That other 9-11: The coup that ended Chile’s Popular Unity government

By Richard Fidler

This year, on September 11, we mark the 50^th anniversary of the coup in Chile. The violent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government put an end to a turbulent experiment in the parliamentary road to socialism initiated with the presidential election of Salvador Allende just three years earlier. The coup government headed by General Augusto Pinochet launched massive and deadly repression and inaugurated the capitalist world’s first major wave of neoliberal economic “reforms,” many of which remain in force today.

It seems appropriate to look back at the Chilean experience – the first breakthrough for the Left in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – and to think about the lessons to be learned for today’s Left and progressive movements. Allende’s electoral base, the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, was a coalition of his Socialist party with the Communist party and several much smaller parties around a programmatic agreement that promised “revolutionary changes” to “liberate Chile from imperialism, exploitation and poverty.” And it pledged to do this in full respect for and compliance with the country’s parliamentary, legal and other institutions.

For an initial balance sheet, I recommend an important article by Ralph Miliband first published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register. Miliband was a prominent sociologist and author of numerous books on socialism and politics, including Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. His essay, too lengthy to be reproduced here, merits reading in its entirety. But here is a brief excerpt, from its concluding section, on “the question of the state and the exercise of power.”

It was noted earlier that a major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization. But in this latter respect, much more needs to be done, not only to realize a set of long-term socialist objectives concerning the socialist exercise of power, but as a means either of avoiding armed confrontation, or of meeting it on the most advantageous and least costly terms if it turns out to be inevitable.

What this means is not simply ‘mobilizing the masses’ or ‘arming the workers’. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses’ and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs ‘mesh’ with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting. But the need is there, and it is imperative that it should be met, in whatever forms are most appropriate.

This is not, to all appearances, how the Allende regime moved. Some of the things that needed doing were done; but such ‘mobilization’ as occurred, and such preparations as were made, very late in the day, for a possible confrontation, lacked direction, coherence, in many cases even encouragement. Had the regime really encouraged the creation of a parallel infra-structure, it might have lived; and, incidentally, it might have had less trouble with its opponents and critics on the left, for instance in the MIR, since its members might not then have found the need so great to engage in actions of their own, which greatly embarrassed the government: they might have been more ready to cooperate with a government in whose revolutionary will they could have had greater confidence. In part at least, ‘ultra-leftism’ is the product of ‘citra-leftism’.

Salvador Allende was a noble figure and he died a heroic death. But hard though it is to say it, that is not the point. What matters, in the end, is not how he died, but whether he could have survived by pursuing different policies; and it is wrong to claim that there was no alternative to the policies that were pursued. In this as in many other realms, and here more than in most, facts only become compelling as one allows them to be so. Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Miliband focused his analysis on the trials and tribulations encountered by the UP government as it sought to pursue, and then retreat from, its reform program in the face of strenuous and mounting opposition by Chile’s capitalists backed by Washington. Writing from afar, he was unable to assess the reactions among the popular forces that constituted the government’s social base. That, however, is the subject matter of a remarkable study of “constituent popular power and the politics of conflict” in Chile from 1970 to 1973 that – in the words of its author Franck Gaudichaud – are “keys to understanding a thousand days that shook the world.”[1] Gaudichaud’s text, adapted from his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Michael Löwy, is a detailed analysis of the forms of “popular power(s)” created in their struggles by the workers, peasants and “pobladores” of the shanty-towns during the UP regime.

This research shows that at the heart of this period of social confrontations and political upheavals, various attempts at what we have proposed to call popular constituent power arose. A notion defined as ‘the creation of social and political experiments of organized counter-power and counter-hegemonies’ leading to ‘new forms of popular collective appropriations’ and ‘a calling into question – total or relative – of relations of production, forms of work organization, social and spatial hierarchies and material or symbolic mechanisms of domination’. It is precisely in the specific (and historically determined) configuration taken by these forms of popular power that the true originality of the Chilean process, its transformative capacity and its historical force are located. This, beyond the unprecedented nature of Allende’s project of transition to socialism or a supposed intangible stability of the democratic institutions of the ‘compromise State’. And it seems to us that there is here a path worth taking, to explore, in the study of other great political crises or Latin American revolutionary processes.

If we examine the various facets of this collective turmoil which mobilized several tens of thousands of employees, pobladores and left-wing activists, we see the emergence of a ‘grammar of protest’ little known to Popular Unity. This idée-force is that of popular power, but in this turbulent sky, one star shone more brightly than others: that of the industrial cordones.[2] Certainly, ‘the theme of the industrial cordones refers to one of the most important and successful experiences of Popular Unity, perhaps approaching one of the most realized utopias of Chilean socialism: that in which the workers built themselves as an historical actor with strong collective economic and political responsibility within the ongoing process. Appearing most of the time on the outskirts of the major cities, these are territorial bodies of class coordination, bringing together the unions of several companies in a specific urban area, with the immediate aim of realizing demands such as the extension of the nationalized sector, workers’ control of production, the self-defense of factories, the increase in wages or even, in the medium term, the establishment of a new institutional architecture, based on municipal and provincial popular councils. The cordones thus draw a new topography of struggles in urban areas, alongside other actors in the social movement. They gradually anchor themselves in a city in struggle and territories appropriated by and for massively mobilized popular classes.

A militant in the Chilean process in the early 1970s was the Peruvian peasant leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died this year at the age of 89. Released from prison in 1970 by Peru’s revolutionary military junta, Blanco made his way to Chile. He authored many articles on the grassroots mobilizations and political conflicts under the UP government. Some were translated and published in English in Intercontinental Press, a socialist newsweekly published in New York City.[3] They provide insightful analyses into the class dynamics of the events, and can be accessed on line. Here is a representative sample:

Chilean Workers Organize Distribution, April 23, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1115.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,35

Right Wing in Popular Unity Consolidates, April 30, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1116.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile, May 7, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1117.pdf#page=8&view=FitV,35

The Sharpening Struggle in Chile, May 28, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1120.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Provocations, Labor Unrest in Chile, June 4, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1121.pdf#page=11&view=FitV,35

Chilean Workers Organize to Meet the Rightist Threat, June 11, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1122.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35

The Workers’ Cordones Challenge the Reformists, June 18, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1123.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

The Role of the Cordones Industriales, November 26, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1142.pdf#page=19&view=FitV,35

Also worth reading:

Allende’s dream, Pinochet’s coup and Chile’s present By Carmen Aguirre.

People in Chile never stopped resisting the dictatorship that began 50 years ago, or seeking to revive the social reforms of the 1970s. A childhood in exile has made it impossible for me to forget that.

This article, published in the Toronto Globe & Mail September 8, is remarkable not least because it is almost unique, amongst the coverage of Chile’s coup in the business media, to remind us of the complicity of Pierre Trudeau’s government in related events before, during and after the Pinochet coup.

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[1] Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970-1973, Mille jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (Presses universitaires de Rennes 2013, free on-line since 2017). In French only, at present.

[2] The Spanish word cordones could be roughly translated in English as “lanyards,” that is, interlaced bodies of workers in different workplaces or geographic units.

[3] As a staff writer for Intercontinental Press in the early 1970s, I met Hugo Blanco for the first time in 1974, in Italy, at the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International.

‘Buen vivir’ and the dilemmas of the left governments in Latin America - II

Two crucial questions

The intransigent defense of sumak kawsay, stoked by the horrors of the “development” that fully legitimates that cosmovision, tends to leave no space in which to account for two very important questions: (a) What is the time frame to which sumak kawsay refers as a civilizing project?; and (b) what is the relation between the “buen vivir” of our original peoples and ecologism, in its distinct variants, including “ecosocialism” and, simultaneously, what might be the relation between sumak kawsay and socialism and communism?

Problems of sumak kawsay in a single country

Indeed, both the theoreticians and the supporters of sumak kawsay appear to have underestimated the temporal requisites of this project. The same criticism can be made of them that has been made by many, Marxists and others, of the fervent impatience of the communist revolutionaries at the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution — that the establishment of socialism appeared in their eyes to be a project of immediate realization, its achievement posing no obstacles that a determined will for change could not overcome. Lenin was one of the first to warn of the error in this conception, observing that in the prevailing conditions in Russia the archaic nature of the social formation would become a formidable rampart against which the transformative projects of socialism would shatter. That is why Lenin foresaw a very long battle to overcome those fetters of the past, something which of course would not occur in the countries of the West when the time came to build socialism. In their case, the Russian revolutionary noted, the construction of socialism would be as easy “as lifting a feather.”

It seems to us that something similar could be happening with sumak kawsay, revealing a certain contradiction in the discourse itself. On the one hand we are assured, correctly, that it is a fundamental philosophical contribution that challenges the basic assumptions of modernity and capitalist civilization. However, the overcoming of five centuries of history (and what a history — with the horrors of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, racism, wars, genocides, state terrorism, the savage depredation of nature, etc.) is conceived by some social movements and political forces as a project that can realistically be confronted by two or three Andean governments and that significant results can almost immediately be obtained.

Just as “socialism in a single country” was intrinsically contradictory, and condemned to failure, why should we think that “sumak kawsay in a single country” fulfills the necessary conditions to assure its victory? If the Soviet Union and China, to cite the most convincing examples, were unable to build socialism regardless of the international equation that Marx and Engels posed in their earliest writings, how could much weaker countries like Bolivia and Ecuador be successful in their proposed refounding of civilization within a few short years and in an environment as unfavourable as the one imposed by the aggressive decadence of the imperial power? Could those countries resolutely advance in a proposal that, from the civilizing standpoint, is even more radical than the productivist socialism that the Soviet Union and China sought to achieve — and regardless of the other countries of the region or at least their immediate geopolitical environment? René Ramírez Gallegos recognizes the seriousness of the challenge when he writes that “we cannot, by ourselves, from Ecuador, build this society that we are talking about.”[1] Obviously, the answer to these questions will not spring from theory but will come from the historical praxis of the peoples. Meanwhile, we think the questions are legitimate and should be taken into account.

Up to now I have discussed the need to rely on a favourable geopolitical environment. But no less significant is the fact that a project of such a radical nature can hardly be imposed overnight, or in one or two presidential terms of office under leaders like Rafael Correa and Evo Morales resolutely identified with that program. Obviously, there are steps that can be taken immediately, but the question is to calculate, with hopeful realism and without needlessly abandoning ideals, just how far one can advance given the correlation of forces that defines the framework of the possible for governments like those of Bolivia and Ecuador.

Clearly, this entails an effort not to confuse the realism needed to transform the world (and not only study or interpret it) with “possibilism.” Realism requires the social forces committed to such a project to carefully plan their steps, to avoid falling into the traps the enemy holds in store. While realism recognizes the dialectical nature — the ever-changing movement — of the conjuncture, and the role of political will in modifying the relationship of forces at a given moment, “possibilism” is the resigned acceptance of what exists and a testimony to the intrinsic inability to respond creatively to the challenges of history. The realist is a general who knows that if he acts correctly he can defeat forces in theory superior to his own; the “possibilist” is someone who has been defeated ideologically and consequently gives up the battle and simply tries to accommodate to the unfortunate circumstances of the present. The realist keeps his eyes on the present and the future, while the “possibilist” is trapped in today’s reality and lacks the imagination or will to think of the future as something distinct from the infinite extension of the present.

While “possibilism” is a snare that has wrecked many transformative projects in Latin America, the other risk is utopianism. It is one thing to have a utopian horizon as an essential and non-negotiable guide to political action — for example, the construction of a communist, decidedly post-capitalist society — and quite another to fall into the utopianism that Marx and Engels criticized in the Communist Manifesto; its dreams were limited to signifying wonderful societies of the future but without identifying the subjects that would create these projects and the complex political, economic, cultural and international mediations — and who says mediations says contradictions! — which, through the class struggle, must necessarily be put in motion in order to convert those dreams into living realities. We are not saying that reflection about these problems is completely absent in the discussions around sumak kawsay. But it does seem to us that matters of such exceptional importance as these have not, at least up to now, received the attention that in our opinion they deserve.

In line with these concerns, Ecuador’s “National Plan for Buen Vivir” proposes a transition from an economy based on exports of primary resources to another based on the production of ecotourism and bioknowledge that is measured over decades. This expresses a prudent realism toward the pace of advance of civilizational change, the inexorable political correlative of which is a politics of compromises. It means that there must be a more or less extended period (depending on many factors that cannot be determined in advance, from theory) in which the old economic organization (that sustains the resources used by the state for its own maintenance and to finance the costly and complicated process of transition toward a new economy and a new sociability, congruent with the precepts of sumak kawsay) will coexist with the new “post-extractivist” economic order. The old order cannot disappear overnight without provoking traumatic shocks, nor can the new appear with the speed of lightning, desirable as that might be. However, this sober diagnostic is not shared by some social movements both in Bolivia and in Ecuador, convinced as they are that this transition can be made to measure with their impatience.

Sumak kawsay, ecologism and the post-capitalist society

Linked with the foregoing is the second element that we noted earlier, which is the relation between sumak kawsay and ecologism. This question, in our view, is of the utmost importance given the strategic role played in the theoretical discourse by Mother Earth and the relation between society and nature. However: what should be examined very carefully is just how consistent the unconditional and intransigent defense of Mother Earth is without an equally radical and intransigent critique of capitalism as a mode of production and hence as a civilization.[2]

Whence the fallacy of the various proposals for a “green economy” or a “green capitalism” advanced by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), which start from the premise that a new “environment-friendly” economic order, making possible an environmentally sustainable world with greater economic growth, full employment and welfare for all, can be built using market mechanisms and technological solutions without altering the power relationships, the logic of capital accumulation or the present profound inequalities.[3]

As we can see, a worrisome ambiguity prevails whenever the defense of the common goods of humanity is formulated in the abstract or, in the best of cases, with isolated questioning of capitalism but without posing, as must be done, the absolute impossibility of defending the rights of Mother Earth without at the same time developing an argument — both theoretical and practical — around the historical necessity to establish an unequivocally post-capitalist sociability. If that does not occur, sumak kawsay can easily be assimilated with some of the many currents of contemporary ecologism that lament the destruction of the environment while not recognizing that the ecocide will only end when the people send capitalism to the museum of history along with the bronze ax and the spinning wheel, as Engels noted in his time in a brilliant passage in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Accordingly, a sumak kawsay worthy of the name can only be that insofar as it is radically anticapitalist, since only the consummation of the socialist project — which involves the socialization of power, wealth and culture and hence the decommodification of society and nature — will make it possible to save Mother Earth. When we say socialization we should clarify that this process should not be identified with the statization of the economy, society, politics or culture. When we speak of socialization we are referring to “popular empowerment,” or in the language of classic Marxism, to a project that will end the despotism of capital while instituting the self-government of the producers. It seems to us that this is a second major theme to discuss, one that likewise seems not to have drawn the attention it deserves.

As will be gathered from the previous point, only a “socialist buen vivir” could offer a way out from the trap in which we are locked by the logic of capital. There is no redemption for Mother Earth if we do not manage to rescue the women and men who people this planet. And within capitalism there is no salvation for humanity, as Fidel Castro told us many years ago. Accordingly, a genuine project of “buen vivir” must in some way redefine the socialist program for the 21^st century. The problem is that this is an eminently practical task, since theory — like the celebrated owl of Minerva mentioned by Hegel — always spreads its wings at nightfall, that is, when the historical praxis of the peoples resolves (or tries to resolve) the challenges confronting society. The major challenge today is to overcome capitalism before it has finished off life on planet Earth. This task is just beginning, which is why theoretical thinking about the new socialism of the 21^st century and its project is only in its initial stages.[4] In other words, not only must sumak kawsay adopt a socialist identity, but socialism itself is searching for a new identity, convinced that the painful (but also highly instructive and in some respects positive) experiences of the 20^th century imperatively require rethinking of the project as a whole.

As we have stated elsewhere, the best way to mistake the road is to try to copy a political experiment. If Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador continue to be examples of significant processes of profound social transformation, it is because, among other things, none has copied from the other and each of them is an original, unique and unrepeatable creation of its own peoples. That is why Simón Rodríguez was right when he said that “either we invent or we go wrong.” In that sense, it is worth paraphrasing anew the poetry of Antonio Machado when he said something to the effect that socialists have no model, the model is made while walking. It is made in the concrete historical praxis of building socialism and in the unrepeatable — original, as Rodríguez said in the twilight of the colonial order — conditions under which each of those processes takes place.[5]

One of the new components of the socialist project for the 21^st century (refused in those of the previous century) has to do precisely with Mother Earth, sacrificed on the altars of a productivism that was no less harmful for the environment than that practiced by the capitalist economies. Referring to this theme, René Ramírez Gallegos (2010: 10), in the previously cited article, writes that “we aim, in the economic model, to build the biopolis, that is, to go beyond the economy of the old consciousness and to make the move from manufacturing to mentefactura, while beginning to consider the production of relational goods. What is the economic model? It is of course that biosocialism that I talked about earlier; and political power will be sustained in people’s power. But that is not done overnight.”[6] And, insisting on the difficult transition from a model based on export of raw materials to one that is a clear departure from capitalist logic, he notes that “to leave this model overnight is not viable, and it is necessary therefore to outline a medium- and long-term road map.”[7]

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[1] René Ramírez Gallegos, “Izquierda postsocialista” (Quito: SENPLADES), Discurso No. 2, November 2010.

[2] This subject has been brilliantly addressed in a recent work by Elmar Altvater, Los limites del capitalismo. Acumulación, crecimiento y huella ecológica (Buenos Aires: Mardulce, 2011).

[3] Edgardo Lander, “Un nuevo período histórico,” pp. 2-3.

[4] We tackled the analysis of this topic and proposed some bibliographical orientations in our book Socialismo sigle XXI. ¿Hay vida después del neoliberalismo? (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Luxemburg, 2008).

[5] Socialismo siglo XXI, op. cit., p. 114.

[6] “Izquierda postsocialista,” op. cit., p. 10.

[7] See Working Document No. 2, “Socialismo del sumak kawsay o biosocialismo republicano,” by René Ramírez Gallegos, SENPLADES, Quito, p. 36.

Marta Harnecker on New Paths Toward 21st Century Socialism

Introduction by Richard Fidler

Among the many panels and plenaries at the Conference of the Society for Socialist Studies, which met in Ottawa June 2-5, was a Book Launch for Marta Harnecker’s latest English-language book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (translated by Federico Fuentes), Monthly Review Press.

The featured speaker was Marta Harnecker, with Professor Susan Spronk and myself invited as discussants. The session was titled “Author Meets Critics.” I am publishing below the opening presentation by Marta, followed by a slightly expanded version of my comment. Unfortunately, time constraints (our session was followed immediately by a panel on current events in Greece) meant that there was little opportunity for discussion from the audience.

As the chair, Michael Lebowitz, noted in his introduction, Marta Harnecker has authored over 80 books as a leading Marxist theorist and popular educator in Latin America, over the course of a career that began in her native Chile and later included extended sojourns in Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries. A World to Build summarizes what in her opinion are the major lessons to be learned so far from the current advances of progressive governments in Latin America and the issues they pose for radicals everywhere.

The Spanish edition of the book was awarded Venezuela’s “Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought” in 2014.

Photo by Andrea Levy

Marta and me.

 

A world to build (New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism) – Marta Harnecker

I completed this book one month after the physical disappearance of President Hugo Chávez, without whose intervention in Latin America this book could not have been written. Many of the ideas I raise in it are related in one way or another to the Bolivarian leader, to his ideas and actions, within Venezuela and at the regional and global level. Nobody can deny that there is a huge difference between the Latin America that Chávez inherited and the Latin America he has left for us today.

That is why I dedicated the book to him with the following words:

To Comandante Chávez, whose words, orientations and exemplary dedication to the cause of the poor will serve as a compass for his people and all the people of the world. It will be the best shield to defend ourselves from those that seek to destroy this marvellous work that he began to build.

Twenty-five years ago left forces in Latin America and in the world in general were going through a difficult period. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the Soviet Union hurtled into the abyss and disappeared completely by the end of 1991.

Deprived of the rear-guard it needed, the Sandinista revolution was defeated at the elections of February 1990 and Central American guerrilla movements were forced to demobilize.

The only country that kept the banners of revolution flying was Cuba.

In that situation it was difficult to imagine that 25 years later most of our countries would be governed by left-wing leaders.

Latin America was the first region where neoliberal policies were introduced. Chile, my country, was used as a testing ground before Margaret Thatcher’s government implemented them in the United Kingdom.

But it was also the first region in the world where these policies gradually came to be rejected; policies which had served only to increase poverty and social inequalities, destroy the environment and weaken working class and popular movements in general.

It was in our subcontinent that left and progressive forces first began to rally after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

After more than two decades of suffering, new hopes were born.

Candidates from left and centre-left groupings managed to win elections in most of the region’s countries.

This process began with the election of Chávez in 1998. At that point, Venezuela was a lonely island in a sea of neoliberalism that covered the continent.

But the neoliberal capitalist model was already beginning to founder. The choice then was whether to re-establish this model with a more human face or to go ahead and try to build another.

Chávez had the courage to take the second path and decided to call it “socialism,” in spite of its negative connotations.

And I say courage because following socialism’s collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, most leftist intellectuals of the world were in a state of confusion.

We seemed to know more about what we did not want socialism to be than what we wanted.

We rejected: lack of democracy, totalitarianism, state capitalist bureaucratic methods, central planning, collectivism that did not respect differences, productivism that emphasized the expansion of productive forces without taking into consideration the need to preserve nature, dogmatism, intolerance towards legitimate opposition, attempts to impose atheism by persecuting believers, the conviction that a sole party was needed to lead the process of transition.

Today, the situation in Latin America has changed. We have a rough idea of what we want.

Yet, why is the region clearer today on what kind of future society we want to construct?

I believe this is largely due to:
First, the practical experience of what we have referred to as “local governments of popular participation.” They are profoundly democratic governments that have opened up spaces for peoples’ empowerment and, thanks to their transparency, contributed to the fight against corruption.
Second, the rediscovery of communitarian indigenous practices, from which we have much to learn, and
Third, what we can learn from those Latin American governments that have proposed moving towards an anticapitalist society.

These beacons, that began to radiate throughout our continent, were strengthened by the resounding failure of neoliberalism, the increased resistance and struggle of social movements, and, more recently, the global crisis of capitalism.

An alternative to capitalism is now more necessary than ever.

Chávez called it “21^st century socialism,” to differentiate it from the Soviet-style socialism that had been implemented in the 20^th century.

This was not about “falling into the errors of the past,” into the same “Stalinist deviations” which bureaucratized the party and ended up eliminating popular participation.

The need for peoples’ participation was one of his obsessions and was the feature that distinguished his proposals from other socialist projects in which the state resolves all the problems and the people receive benefits as if they were gifts.

He was convinced that socialism could not be decreed from above, that it had to be built with the people.

And he also understood that protagonistic participation is what allows people to grow and achieve self-confidence, that is, to develop themselves as human beings.

I always remember the first program of “Aló Presidente Teórico,” which was broadcast on June 11, 2009, when Chávez quoted at length from a letter that Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, wrote to Lenin on March 4, 1920:

Kropotkin wrote:

Without the participation of local forces, without an organization from below of the peasants and workers themselves, it is impossible to build a new life. It seemed that the soviets were going to fulfil precisely this function of creating an organization from below. But Russia has already become a Soviet Republic in name only. The party’s influence over people [...] has already destroyed the influence and constructive energy of this promising institution – the soviets.

Think about how significant it was that Chávez was quoting Kropotkin in this program that all Venezuela was watching.

This model of socialism, which many have called “real socialism,” is a fundamentally statist, centralist, bureaucratic model, where the key missing factor is popular participation.

Michael Lebowitz has recently called this model the society of the conductor and the conducted.^[1]

Do you remember when this socialism collapsed and people talked about the death of socialism and the death of Marxism?

At the time, Eduardo Galeano, the wonderful Uruguayan writer who recently died, said that we were invited to a funeral we did not belong at. The socialism that died was not the socialist project we had fought for.

Real socialism had little to do with Marx and Engels’ vision of socialism. For them, socialism was impossible without popular participation.

If we look at Latin America, the map of our region has radically changed since 1998. A new balance of forces has been established which makes it more difficult for the United States to achieve its objectives in the region.

The US government no longer has the same freedom as it used to have to manoeuvre in our region.

Now it has to deal with rebel Latin American governments who have their own agenda, which often clashes with the White House agenda.

We should be clear, however, that the attempts of US Imperialism to stop the forward march of our countries continue and have even increased in the last period.

However, the most advanced countries of our region have begun to make steps to build another world. Is has been called Socialism of the 21st Century, Christian Indoamericano Socialism, Indoamericano, Sociedad del Buen Vivir (Good life society) or Sociedad de la vida en plenitude (Full life society). A socialism where the human being is the centre and human development is the goal.

I say that those countries are in transition to socialism.

But what type of transition are we talking about?

We are not dealing with a transition occurring in advanced capitalist countries, something that has never occurred in history, nor of a transition in a backward country where the people have conquered state power via armed struggle as occurred with 20th century revolutions (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and others). Instead, we are dealing with a very particular transition where, via the institutional road, we have achieved governmental power.

In this regard, I think the situation in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s is in some ways comparable to that experienced by pre-revolutionary Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century. What the imperialist war and its horrors were for Russia, neoliberalism and its horrors were for Latin America: the extent of hunger and misery, increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, destruction of nature, increasing loss of our sovereignty.

In these circumstances, our peoples said “enough!” and began to walk, resisting at first, and then going on the offensive, making possible the victory of left or centre-left presidential candidates on the back of anti-neoliberal programs.

This process of transformation from government is not only a long process but also a process full of challenges and difficulties. Nothing ensures that it will be a linear process; there is always the possibility of retreats and failures.

This process has to confront not only backward economic conditions but also the fact that the people still do not have complete state power.

These governments inherited a state apparatus whose characteristics are functional to the capitalist system, but are not suitable for advancing towards socialism.

In relation to this, we should recall that the first socialist experiment in the Western world by the institutional way took place in Chile, with the triumph of President Salvador Allende and the leftist Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, UP) coalition in September 1970.

I think Allende’s socialist project was the precursor of the 21^st century socialism of which President Chávez was the great promoter.

Not only was Allende the first socialist president in the Western world to be elected democratically, by popular vote, he was the first to try advancing toward socialism by the institutional road and the first to understand that to do this he had to take his distance from the Soviet model.

Socialism by the institutional way cannot be imposed from above, it has to rely on the support of a large majority of the population.

Remember, though, that Allende won with a simple plurality (only 36% of the votes); the rest of the votes were divided between Christian Democrats and conservatives. As a result Allende was obliged to make agreements with the Christian Democrats to have their support in the Congressional vote of ratification in November 1970.

One of the great limitations that the Allende government had was the institutional framework it inherited.

The Chilean president knew they needed to elaborate a new constitution in order to change the institutional rules of the game and to facilitate the peaceful transition to socialism.^[2] Why did he never issue that call? Probably because the Popular Unity still lacked the majority electoral support that was indispensable if a successful constituent process was to be carried out. The UP never managed to achieve 50% or more of the votes.^[3] But why not try to change that situation?

Perhaps he lacked audacity, the audacity that President Chávez had when the opposition called for a referendum to overthrow him and he agreed to enter the fight even though at that point the polls put him far behind. He immediately planned how to achieve the forces to win in this contest and he created the idea of the patrols, that is, groups of 10 persons who could involve people who were not members of parties but who sympathized with Chávez; each of them was to win the support of another 10 by going house to house.

Unfortunately, Allende’s project was too heterodox for the Chilean orthodox left of that time, a left that was too orthodox, as its positions did not correspond to the new challenges that the country was undergoing. I can give you some examples of that orthodoxy^[4] later if you want.

One of the more important lessons we can extract from the Chilean process is the importance of the popular organization at the base. One of our greatest weaknesses was not to understand this, to delegate political action to the politicians, or rather, the fact that the politicians appropriated politics and, with that, the Popular Unity committees — which were basic to Allende’s electoral victory — began to weaken and to disappear.

When Allende was defeated by a military coup on September 11, 1973, most of the left activists saw this as confirmation of the need to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus and abandon attempts to advance toward socialism via the institutional road.

Nevertheless, practice has demonstrated, contrary to the theoretical dogmatism of some sectors of the radical left, that if revolutionary cadres run the government, the inherited State apparatus can be used as an instrument in the process of building the new society.

But we must be clear, this does not mean that the cadres can simply limit themselves to using the inherited state. It is necessary — using the power in their hands — to go about building a new correlation of forces that can be used to begin to build the foundations of the new political system and new institutions — the new rules of the institutional game, that is to say, a new Constitution and new laws, which can create spaces for popular participation that can help prepare the people to exercise power from the most simple to the most complex level.

And we should build a new correlation of forces overcoming the old and deeply rooted error of attempting to build political force without building social force.

However, we should always remember that the right only respects the rules of the game as long as it suits their purposes.

They can tolerate and even help bring a left government to power if that government implements the policies of the right and limits itself to managing the crisis.

What they will always try to prevent, by legal or illegal means — and we should have no illusions about this — is a program of deep democratic and popular transformations that puts into question their economic interests.

We can deduce from this that these governments and the left must be prepared to confront fierce resistance. They must be capable of defending the achievements they have won democratically against forces that speak about democracy as long as their material interests and privileges are not touched. Was it not the case in Venezuela that the initial enabling laws, which only slightly impinged on these privileges, were the main factor in unleashing a process that culminated in a military coup in 2002, supported by right-wing opposition parties, against a democratically elected president supported by his people?

It is also important to understand that the dominant elite does not represent the entire opposition. It is vital that we differentiate between a destructive, conspiratorial, anti-democratic opposition and a constructive opposition that is willing to respect the rules of the democratic game and collaborate in many tasks that are of common interest.

That was the strategy that Fidel Castro followed in fighting against Batista’s dictatorship, as I explained in my book, Fidel Castro's Political Strategy: From Moncada to Victory.^[5]

In this way we avoid putting all opposition forces and personalities in the same basket. We divide the enemy and concentrate our forces on the principal one.

Being capable of recognizing the positive initiatives that the democratic opposition promotes and not condemning a priori everything they suggest will, I believe, help us win over many sectors that in the beginning are not on our side. Perhaps not the elite leaders, but the middle cadres and broad sections of the people influenced by them, which is most important.

Another important challenge these governments face is the need to overcome the inherited culture that exists within the people, but not only among them. It also persists among government cadres, functionaries, party leaders and militants, workers and social movements leaderships. I’m talking about traits such as individualism, personalism, political careerism, consumerism, top down methods of leadership, etc.

Moreover, since advances come at a slow pace many leftists tend to become demoralized. When solutions are not rapidly forthcoming, people get disillusioned.

That is why I believe that, just as our revolutionary leaders need to use the state in order to change the inherited balance of forces, they must also carry out a pedagogical task when they are confronted with limits or brakes along the path.

I call this a pedagogy of limitations.

Many times we believe that talking about difficulties will only demoralize and dishearten the people, when, on the contrary, if our popular sectors are kept informed, are explained why it is not possible to immediately achieve the desired goals, this can help them better understand the process in which they find themselves and moderate their demands.

Intellectuals as well should be widely informed so they are able to defend the process and also to criticize it if necessary.

But this pedagogy of limitations must be simultaneously accompanied by encouragement of popular mobilizations and creativity, thereby avoiding the possibility that initiatives from the people become domesticated and prepare us to accept criticisms of possible faults within the government.

Not only should popular pressure be tolerated, it should be understood that it is necessary to help those in government combat errors and deviations that can emerge along the way.

It is impossible to develop here all the measures that have been taking place in the most advanced governments in the region. But if we have time, we will be able to explore some of them here. I believe that they are the best demonstration that we can advance by the institutional road toward socialism.

If we keep in mind all the factors we have mentioned above, rather than confining ourselves to classifying Latin American governments according to some kind of typology, as many analysts have done, we can evaluate their performance while bearing in mind the correlation of forces within which they operate. We should pay less attention to the speed with which they are advancing, and look more at the direction in which they are going, since the speed will, to a large extent, depend on how these governments deal with obstacles in their path.

To finish, I would like to read out some of the most important criteria that I think help us to evaluate whether or not our most advanced governments are taking steps towards building a new society.

I propose the following questions; you will find many more in the book.

Do they mobilize workers and the people in general to carry out certain measures and are they contributing to an increase in their abilities and power?

Do they understand the need for an organized, politicized people, one able to exercise the necessary pressure that can weaken the state apparatus they inherited and thus drive forward the proposed transformation process?

Do they understand that our people must be protagonists and not supporting actors?

Do they listen to the people and let them speak?

Do they understand that they can rely on them to fight the errors and deviations that come up along the way?

Do they give them resources and call on them to exercise social control over the process?

To sum up, are they contributing to the creation of a popular subject that is increasingly the protagonist, assuming governmental responsibilities?

To the extent that they are doing this, they are presenting a real alternative to capitalism, to the extent they are not, they will disappoint those who have hopes in this Latin American transition to socialism.

I would like to conclude by insisting on something I never tire of repeating:

In order to successfully advance in this challenge, we need a new culture on the left: a pluralist and tolerant culture that puts first what unites us and leaves as secondary what divides us; that promotes a unity based on values such as solidarity, humanism, respect for differences, defence of nature, rejection of the desire for profit and the laws of the market as guiding principles for human activity.

A left that understands that radicalism is not about raising the most radical slogans nor taking the most radical actions, which only a few follow because the majority are scared off by them. Instead, it is about being capable of creating spaces for coming together and for struggle, that bring in broader sectors, because realizing that there are many of us in the same struggle is what makes us strong and radicalizes us.

A left that understands that we have to win hegemony, that is, that we have to convince rather than impose.

A left that understands that what we do together in the future is more important than what we may have done in the past.

* * *

A comment on Marta’s book and some of the issues it raises (Richard Fidler)

Marta’s book is an excellent overview of the “new paths toward 21^st c. socialism” being taken today, with the focus on Latin America.

Particularly useful is Marta’s typology of the governments in the subcontinent: those merely giving neoliberalism a makeover; and those that are antineoliberal, themselves divided between those that don’t actually break from neoliberalism and those that want to go beyond not just neoliberalism but the capitalist system of which neoliberalism is the current expression.

Included in this discussion is Marta’s list of criteria by which to judge how much progress the latter types of governments are actually making.

I am billed at this presentation as a “critic,” however...

If I were to criticize, I think the book may not give enough emphasis to the problems to be encountered along the way, and be more assertive on ways to confront and overcome those problems.

This was brought home to me in her discussion of the correlation of forces, and some of the achievements made so far by Latin American governments in reducing the hegemony of US imperialism. Marta mentions the Banco del Sur, the sucre currency, the ALBA Bank. In the translated edition (the original Spanish text was published in 2013) she might have mentioned the “new financial architecture” of the BRICS, which includes Brazil, with new credit lines, etc. However, much of this is still music of the future: the Banco del Sur has yet to be established after six or seven years of talk; the sucre has had very limited use, in a few transactions; the ALBA Bank barely functions, and I suspect that BRICS credit lines will replicate those of Brazil’s development bank, largely devoted to funding infrastructure projects that benefit Brazilian transnationals.

The reason for these institutional weaknesses is of course that fundamentally all of these countries are integral parts of a global financial, trade and investment system within a global capitalism shaped by the United States and its imperialist allies. In another workshop here this week, Bill Carroll made the point that “regionalization is to globalization as a part is to the whole.” In Latin America today, many theorists wrongly portray the formation of regional alliances as an antidote to globalization instead of seeing it as a particular defensive strategy that still does not address some of the underlying dynamics, and in fact reinforces them in some respects (e.g. Brazil’s growing hegemony in South America, in alliance with China).

The new political alliances, UNASUR and CELAC, while a major advance over the OAS in that they exclude the United States and Canada, still suffer from rules of unanimity, which (through a government like Colombia’s) gives Washington an indirect but effective veto on contentious issues. Also, we need to bear in mind the way in which Washington has successfully divided Latin America with its trans-Pacific strategy — bringing Mexico (already a NAFTA member), Colombia, Peru and Chile into the TransPacific Partnership, under US hegemony.

And despite their success at taking advantage of the rise of China and the initial stirrings of a more multipolar world, the Latin American countries have not managed to escape their rentier dependency on exports of largely unprocessed non-renewable and renewable resources — hydrocarbons, minerals, agribusiness products like soy, etc. Besides making them highly vulnerable to shifts in global prices, this economic pattern is disastrous for the ecology. The economic problems being experienced today in Venezuela, where the chavista government has made the greatest advances socially and in terms of building popular power from below, are directly linked to its hydrocarbon dependency.

I want to talk now about the topic of the last part of the book, on the need for “a new political instrument for a new hegemony.” What I express here is not criticism of Marta’s approach but rather some thoughts to expand on it, with concrete (and critical) reference to our local experiment, Québec solidaire.

First, note Marta’s terminology — which actually mimics the official name of Bolivia’s MAS, which is the MAS-IPSP, the Movement for Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples. She and Fred Fuentes have authored a fine book (only in Spanish) on how that party developed as a “political instrument” in the 1990s and early 2000s. And how marvellously adapted it was not only to engage in the epic mass conflicts over privatization of water and transnational control of the country’s hydrocarbon resources, but to help mobilize broad rural and urban forces that could overthrow governments and, in 2005, elect a government of its own.

The term “political instrument” is deliberate. I think it is meant (among other things) to differentiate her subject from what most of us associate with the political parties we know from our experiences — both the mass capitalist parties and the much smaller, largely ineffectual (and usually quite sectarian) self-proclaimed “vanguard” parties of the far left.

Marta does a fine job of explaining what she means by “hegemony” and the strategic conception of building “broad fronts” and “social blocs” in pursuit of key objectives that advance the struggle for popular power. She lays great emphasis on the need to change the political culture on the left, to fight class reductionism, and to prioritize points of convergence.

The essential concept here is the idea of a party (or political instrument) as encompassing the proletariat in the broadest sense of that word, to represent all those who are oppressed and exploited by capitalism.

Bear in mind that in most of Latin America, a continent that was devastated by neoliberalism, its traditional left parties and unions destroyed, these political instruments did not exist a couple of decades ago. In most cases (as in Venezuela and Ecuador, in particular) they are quite recent, organized top-down by progressive governments trying to structure and extend popular support; in Bolivia, where the MAS government self-identifies as a “government of the (already existing) social movements,” those movements maintain a problematic and sometimes conflictual relationship to the MAS leadership. The situations vary widely from one country to another. In another period, the Cubans went through a long process of figuring out ways in which to institutionalize their political process.

But obviously when we talk strategy we are talking about leadership. Marta discusses this in the sense of “popular protagonism,” which she explains as finding ways to involve the largest number of people in progressive, grassroots political activity, and she discusses the various approaches that this can involve.

I think it is useful, in this connection, to recall what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said about the party question in the Communist Manifesto, where they could hardly avoid it as the Manifesto was predicated on what they saw as the imminence of proletarian revolution. It is yet another part of the Manifesto that was long forgotten or overlooked, but has considerable relevance today.

Although it was titled “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx and Engels saw their party, or political current, as simply the leading edge of the broader proletarian movement. They were categorical:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

I think that is a very good approach to the question of protagonistic leadership, one that is applicable today. But again, this is addressed to the “communists,” whom we can perhaps define, in light of that approach, as a “vanguard.” That term is frowned on today because of the past of so many self-declared vanguards that hang out in exclusive circles, eager to critique and oppose all other currents, often with a self-perpetuating central leadership cadre, awaiting the great day when the masses will finally discover them and accept to be led by them to victory. Obviously, we are talking about a quite different concept. The big debate — and the answers will vary from one country to another — is over how to implement it.

The Manifesto’s vanguard (“the Communists”) is distinguished, inter alia, by its strategic overview and its determination to advance it within the broader party and popular movements (today’s counterpart of the “proletariat” in most countries). To be effective, it will in virtually every case have to have some organized presence and the right to function within the broad party as a tendency or faction, provided of course that it respects the majority decisions of the party membership.

This distinction is not widely understood or implemented in much of the left, even where (as in Venezuela’s PSUV or, closer to home, Québec Solidaire) there is a right to form an organized political tendency. In the PSUV, as I understand it, left factions like Marea Socialista remain quite marginal, lacking resources within the party to publish their views and engage with the membership as a whole. In QS, the recognized “collectives” have little presence, and there is no formal provision for their proportional representation in the leadership bodies, although the party defines itself as “pluralist.”

Yesterday, some of us participated in an excellent panel discussion featuring young activists on current attempts in Quebec and Canada — and Scotland! — to build “a social movement convergence.” The leading attempt on this continent is Québec solidaire, a product of some 20 years of efforts to bring together global justice advocates, feminists, community grassroots activists and survivors of previous far left parties (Maoists and Trotskyists mainly) in a party that purports to practice politics both at the ballot box — it has three members of the National Assembly — and “in the streets.”

It’s a notable achievement, but I just want to note here that it also demonstrates how complex and problematic this process of broad left regroupment can prove to be if it is not accompanied by clear agreement on some fundamentals. For me, there are two major problems in QS, both of which point to the need for leadership by a far-sighted and protagonist party “vanguard” in the sense of the Manifesto.

One is the incoherency on the Quebec national question, where QS projects, in sequence, (1) a Constituent Assembly, (2) a referendum for popular adoption of whatever constitutional proposals or draft the Assembly produces. But the purpose of the assembly is left undefined: whether to design an independent state, or to simply propose some changes to the existing constitutional order, which most Québécois are convinced, correctly, does not represent them adequately as a nation.

This is important, because if you are pro-independence, as QS says it is, you will want the Constituent Assembly to propose the constitution for a democratic sovereign state and see that as its purpose. QS however persists in elevating an abstract democratic right of the Assembly to decide that preliminary issue, over the fundamental democratic right of self-determination as a nation, which points clearly toward a sovereigntist solution. Democracy trumps clarity.

Ambiguity here is not a virtue. In today’s conditions, where sovereignty is not a majority option among the Québécois, a Constituent Assembly without a clear mandate might come up with simply a proposal for membership in a revised federation that continues to bar the way to transcending capitalism.

The QS approach is, quite simply, non-strategic. In my view, the party would benefit greatly if it were to cast its program in the framework of building “another Quebec,” one with the sovereign power, for example, to nationalize the banking and financial sector, which is a precondition to implementing many anticapitalist measures. If you stay within the provincial framework, as QS election platforms do, you cannot address these key challenges with any credibility.

A reorientation on this question is badly needed — especially if QS is to benefit from the current crisis of the Parti Québécois, which still hegemonizes the independence movement with its neoliberal program. QS incoherence on the proposed path to sovereignty has hindered it from winning dissident and disappointed péquistes to its ranks. I keep hoping that the self-identified Marxists within QS, a very small minority, I’ll acknowledge, could find a way to help clarify this conundrum.

The second problem is an ongoing tension within QS over its relationship to the social movements that it seeks to represent. Basically, it’s the tension between the party of the streets and the party of the ballot boxes. QS is largely the latter. Nine years after its founding, it is still in the process of adopting its basic program, although much of the program is being invented and defined by its small parliamentary contingent as they grapple with issues of the day. Most of the party’s activity comes down to organizing for elections. QS members sometimes march in demonstrations with the party’s banner, although in most cases no attempt is made to single out QS proposals (in the form of placards and slogans) for developing the struggle around the particular theme of the mobilization. Its MNAs see their role as spokespeople for the movements, which is necessary of course.

But should the party do more? How can it help to empower, to develop the capacities, of the movements by working with them to find ways to link their immediate aims with the over-arching need to fight for political power in the state and to use that governmental power to transform the relationship of class forces?

Some activists in QS have proposed a much more protagonist approach to the party’s relations with the social movements, which are relatively strong in Quebec. A formal proposal[6] by some members a few years ago included the idea that QS members play an active role in helping to develop a social and political front of popular resistance; host meetings where QS and the social movements could share their experiences, and – perhaps most important – encourage networking within the party of the QS members who belong to the various social movements, to coordinate their work in those movements. That proposal was withdrawn from debate by the party leadership on the eve of a programmatic convention.

These ideas were however advanced again, and adopted,[7] at a QS National Council meeting last November. It was agreed that QS members in the extraparliamentary milieu should network and help to provide the party with a more concrete, more complete vision of the situation in each movement, and to develop common strategic perspectives to encourage the mobilization and convergence of the movements, especially in the trade unions, the student movement and the women’s movement.

However, to date few such initiatives have been taken, and the party’s top leadership seems reluctant to pursue this line of march.

Marta quotes Bolivia’s vice-president, Álvaro García Linera, in a riff on the Zapatista concept of “mandar obedeciendo”, or to govern by obeying. The leader, he says, “is simply a unifier of ideas, someone who articulates the needs of the people, and nothing else.”

I would argue that something else is needed: a leadership that does have a profound understanding of our history as anticapitalists, and of the experiences, both positive and negative, of 19^th and 20^th century socialism. García Linera, an elected leader of a country, does in fact operate that way in Bolivia, as someone with a developed strategic conception of what is to be done now and next.

That’s an idea we can develop further, using the valuable discussion that Marta engages in this book.

---

[1]. Michael Lebowitz, The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: The Conductor and the Conducted (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012).

[2] In fact, President Allende presented the parties making up the Popular Unity with a proposal for a new constitution in September 1972. I think it is important to study this document because it embodied Allende’s ideas on how the social transition should be made based on the Chilean reality.

[3]. In the 1971 municipal elections, the UP got 49% of the popular vote, the high point in its electoral support.

[4]. See more in: From Allende’s Chile to Chávez’s Venezuela – an interview by Isabel Rauber: http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/2015/04/marta-harnecker-on-challenges-of.html.

[5]. Pathfinder Press, 1987.

[6] For the text (in English), see “Québec Solidaire and the social movements,” appended to Quebec election: A seismic shift within the independence movement?

[7] For the text (in French), see note 14 in Les mouvements sociaux et Québec solidaire : réflexions sur une contribution d’Amir Khadir.

Marta Harnecker on the challenges of advancing toward socialism via the institutional road

From Allende’s Chile to Chávez’s Venezuela – an interview by Isabel Rauber

Introduction by Richard Fidler

Marta Harnecker, a Marxist writer and lecturer of Chilean origin, is one of the foremost international exponents of the revolutionary process in Latin America today.

In the following interview she outlines some of the lessons she has derived from her experience with the Popular Unity government of Chile’s Salvador Allende (1970-73) that are applicable to current attempts in Latin America to build “an alternative society to capitalism that is essentially democratic.”

Harnecker is the author of many books and pamphlets on movements to build “21^st century socialism,” drawing on her first-hand engagement in such experiments throughout Latin America. In this interview, as always, her emphasis is on forms and methods of popular organization, including the development of “a new militancy in which the way we live and work politically prefigures the new society,” while pointing to the need for anticapitalist forces to “develop an alternative project.”

Marta Harnecker will be a featured speaker at the sessions of the Society for Socialist Studies, meeting in Ottawa June 2-5. (http://socialiststudies.ca/congress/2015-ottawa/).

This interview was conducted in Buenos Aires by Isabel Rauber, a prominent Argentine Marxist, and aired on Rauber’s radio program on September 16, 2013. The transcript, from which I have translated the major part, was published by Rauber on her blog, Código Rauber. The footnotes are mine.

In her introductory comments, not translated here, Harnecker notes that during Allende’s presidency she was a member of his Socialist Party and an editor of the political journal Chile Hoy, published by the Popular Unity coalition and open to the entire left including the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), a revolutionary current that gave critical support to the Popular Unity government. (R.F.)

* * *

Marta Harnecker, interviewed by Isabel Rauber

What do you think would be the fundamental message for the present tasks facing the popular governments on the continent in relation to their peoples and to power?

You know, Isabel, I think Allende’s socialist project was the precursor of the 21^st century socialism of which President Chávez was the great promoter.

Not only was Allende the first socialist president in the world to be elected democratically,[1] he was the first to try advancing toward socialism by the institutional road and the first to understand that to do this he had to take his distance from the Soviet model.

That socialism could not be imposed from above, it had to rely on the support of a large majority of the population, and it had to be a part of the national traditions, a socialism with red wine and empanadas as he designated it, that is, a democratic socialist society rooted in the national-popular traditions.

Unfortunately, Allende’s project was too heterodox for the Chilean left of that time, a left that was too orthodox, as its positions did not correspond to the new challenges that the country was undergoing. I will give you some examples of that orthodoxy:

When Allende talked about the democratic transition to socialism, some sectors of the left painted on the walls "Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat!”

When Allende — aware that the Chilean electorate was divided very roughly in thirds: the conservatives, the Christian democrats and the left, with a slight preponderance of the left — posed the need to count on the support of the Christian democrats, with which majority support could be achieved for the project, our left reacted in a very sectarian fashion by confronting the members of that party; it never understood the need to ally with forces that were designated as bourgeois.

When Allende spoke of winning sectors of the bourgeoisie to his project, a major part of the left reaffirmed that our enemy was the bourgeoisie as a whole.

While Allende wanted to consolidate the advances being made on the economic plane — state ownership of the major strategic enterprises, making very clear the limits of the power that he was relying on — sectors of the left seized small businesses and called for their nationalization, demanding that Allende be more radical.

When Allende was fighting to achieve a united leadership of the process, the strongest parties (the Socialists and the Communists) publicized their differences.

One of the great limitations that the Allende government had was the institutional framework it inherited. Although the President and the Popular Unity clearly needed to elaborate a new constitution in order to change the institutional rules and facilitate the peaceful transition to socialism — and in fact President Allende presented the parties making up the Popular Unity with a proposal for a new constitution in September 1972 — he never issued a call to carry out this project. I think it is important to study it because it embodied Allende’s ideas on how the social transition should be made based on the Chilean reality.[2]

So why, then, did he never issue that call? Because he thought the Popular Unity still lacked the majority electoral support that was indispensable if a successful constituent process was to be carried out. The UP never managed to achieve 50% or more of the votes. The big question that history cannot answer is what would have happened if that so-called political coalition had decided to exert its forces and go house-by-house working to win the population to its project.

Perhaps we lacked audacity, the audacity that President Chávez had when the opposition called for a referendum to overthrow him and he agreed to enter the fight even though at that point the polls put him far behind. He agreed to weigh in at a time when he was at a disadvantage, but he immediately planned how to achieve the forces to win in this contest and he created the idea of the patrols, that is, groups of 10 persons who could involve people who were not members of parties but who sympathized with Chávez; each of them was to win the support of another 10 by going house to house.

Another lesson that I think is fundamental in the Chilean process is the importance of the popular organization at the base. One of our greatest weaknesses was not to understand this, to delegate political action to the politicians, or rather, the fact that the politicians appropriated politics and, with that, the Popular Unity committees — which were basic to Allende’s electoral victory — began to weaken and to disappear.

What in your view are the challenges and the principal tasks for the popular movements and the Latin American left?

I think our left and our popular movements must be very aware of what occurred in the Chilean experience, so we don’t repeat the same errors.

We have to understand that in order to build an alternative society to capitalism that is essentially democratic we have to be able to win the hearts and minds of the majority of the people.

The present crisis of capitalism means that larger and larger sectors are feeling affected. Already there exist not only objective conditions but also subjective conditions for more and more people to understand that capitalism is not the solution to their day-to-day problems.

We need to develop an alternative project, and in this the experiences of the governments and popular movements in the more advanced countries in our region can be especially valuable.

What is required is a new militancy in which the way we live and work politically prefigures the new society.

Activists who embody in their daily activity the values that they say they defend. They must be democratic, supportive, willing to cooperate with others, to practice comradeship, complete honesty, sobriety. They have to project vitality and a cheerful approach to life.

While we fight for the social liberation of women, we have to begin now to transform the relations between men and women within the family.

Our members must be able to learn from the new social actors of the 21^st century. They are particularly sensitive to the theme of democracy. Their struggles have generally had the fight against oppression and discrimination as their point of departure. Hence they reject attempts to manipulate them and they demand respect for their autonomy and to be allowed to participate democratically in decision-making.

I think our members must also be disciplined. I know this is not a very sympathetic subject for many people. I like to quote one of the national coordinators of the MST, the Rural Landless Workers Movement, Joao Pedro Stédile, who says: “If we don’t have a minimum of discipline, which means that people respect the decisions of the various authorities, we will not build an organization.

“Discipline consists in accepting the rules of the game. We have learned this even in football and in the Catholic Church, which is one of the oldest organizations in the world…. If someone is in the organization by his own free will, he has to help build the rules and respect them, he has to be disciplined, he has to respect the collective. If not, the organization does not grow.”

But that does not mean that our cadres must have an order and command mentality. They must be popular educators, respectful of the creative initiative of the people.

On the other hand, a new political culture is needed, a pluralist and tolerant culture that prioritizes what unites us ahead of what divides us, that promotes unity around such values as solidarity, humanism, respect for differences, defense of nature, rejecting the profit motive and market laws as the guiding principles of human activity.

We need a left that begins to realize that radicalism is not in advancing more radical slogans or carrying out more radical actions — which only a few follow because they frighten the majority — but in being able to create spaces for encounter and struggle for broad layers, because finding that we are many when we are in the same struggle is what makes us strong, what radicalizes us.

A left that understands the need to win hegemony, that is, the need to convince, not to impose.

A left that understands what is more important than what we have done in the past is what we do together in the future in order to conquer our sovereignty and build a society that allows the full development of human beings, the socialist society of the 21^st century.

Final message

Lastly, I want to tell you that while capitalism is in crisis, it will not disappear all by itself. If our peoples do not unite, organize and struggle intelligently, creatively and courageously, capitalism will find a way to repair itself.

Our peoples have said ENOUGH and begun to walk, they must not stop now, the struggle is long but the future is ours!

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For more articles, videos, and pamphlets by Marta Harnecker consult this: http://tinyurl.com/l5wt896.

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[1] Meaning by the parliamentary and electoral method. – RF.

[2] For a similar conclusion by another observer of the Chilean process, see this article by the late and lamented Roger Burbach, The Other September 11: The Legacy of Chilean Socialism and Salvador Allende. – RF.