{"id":974,"date":"2019-03-10T15:49:42","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T15:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?p=974"},"modified":"2019-10-21T01:03:10","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T00:03:10","slug":"pinochet-and-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/pinochet-and-socialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinochet and socialism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article has been reproduced from the Socialist Standard<\/a><\/em> (December 1998)<\/a>, the monthly journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The arrest of the Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet in London in October reopened the debate\nabout the overthrow by the armed forces of the Allende government in 1973. At the time\nLeninists and anarchists trumpeted this as confirmation of their argument that it is not\npossible to use existing limited, political democracy to abolish capitalism. So it is\nworth restating why what happened in Chile in 1973 is not relevant to our case that\ncapitalism can be abolished by a democratically-organised socialist majority using\nalready-established elective and representative institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Chilean experience is not relevant for three basic reasons. First, Allende and the\nPeople’s Unity (Unidad Popular) alliance which supported him did not enjoy majority\nsupport. Second, Allende and People’s Unity did not stand for socialism but for state\ncapitalism. Third, it was an attempt to improve things within the context of a single\ncountry on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the presidential elections held in September 1970 Allende polled 36 percent of the\nvotes cast, just beating his conservative opponent who got 35 percent while the Christian\nDemocrat candidate got 28 percent. In other words, in a three-way contest Allende won by\nnot much more than the minimum possible-one-third of the votes plus one. Under the\nconstitution then in force in Chile, if no candidate won over 50 percent it was left to\nCongress to decide. Allende was elected president with the help of the Christian Democrat\nmembers of Congress, perfectly constitutionally but without majority support for his\nprogramme. So he was in a much weaker position vis-\u00e0-vis his opponents than a socialist\nmajority would be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the support Allende enjoyed was not for socialism anyway. People’s Unity which he\nheaded was an alliance of the Chilean Socialist Party, the Chilean Communist Party and\nvarious smaller leftwing groups. Its short-term aim was to carry out various reforms in\nfavour of workers and peasants within the context of capitalism. Its long-term aim,\nstrongly influenced by the Communist Party and people who thought like them within the\nSocialist Party (of course the one was no more communist in the proper sense than the\nother was socialist), was something along the lines of what existed in Russia, i.e. state\ncapitalism. Maybe Russian-style total state capitalism can’t be established by peaceful\nmeans, but what relevance has this to establishing socialism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, socialism cannot be established in just one country. The Allende government\ncould not have established socialism even if it wanted to and had, therefore, no\nalternative but to run capitalism. However capitalism, as we have always insisted, cannot\nby its nature be run in the interests of the working class majority. So, like other\nreformists, Allende was unable to deliver on his promises. Even though elections held in\nMarch 1973 showed that the support of a third or so of the population for People’s Unity\nstill held up, discontent grew amongst the two-thirds majority which didn’t support it,\nthe discontent exploited by the government’s opponents, encouraged and helped by the CIA\n(in pursuit of the US strategic interest not to allow Russian state capitalism to\nestablish another bridgehead besides Cuba in their backyard) and multinationals like ITT\n(who feared nationalisation without adequate compensation).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By September 1973 the conservative (not to say fascist) minded leaders of the armed\nforces, led by General Pinochet, decided the time was ripe to stage a coup. The\npresidential palace was bombarded and Allende killed and a brutal regime the like of which\nthe world had not seen since Franco won the Spanish Civil War was installed. A veritable\nreign of terror, designed to cow the third of the population who still supported Allende,\nwas unleashed. Thousands of opponents were rounded up, tortured and killed; elective\ninstitutions were dissolved and working class organisations banned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No wonder most people were content to see Pinochet arrested and suffer a few\nuncomfortable moments, if not end his days in a Spanish jail (Thatcher, who saw a kindred\nspirit, being a notable exception). But this does not alter the fact that the government\nPinochet overthrew had nothing to do with socialism but was a government without majority\nbacking aiming to move towards state capitalism in the context of a world in which two\nsuper-powers were struggling for domination. The quite different conditions that will\nobtain on the eve of socialism-mass support for socialism throughout the world-will be\nsufficient to deter any suicidal attempt by a latter-day Pinochet to halt the progress of\nhistory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Please email your comments about this article to feedback@worldsocialism.org<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back to the Politics index<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back to the World Socialist Movement home page<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article has been reproduced from the Socialist Standard (December 1998), the monthly journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain The arrest of the Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet in London in October reopened the debate about the overthrow by the armed forces of the Allende government in 1973. At the time Leninists and anarchists trumpeted…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1997,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=974"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2627,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions\/2627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}