What Happened to the Chilean Revolution?

In September 1970, Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile, sending the country down the so-called “Chilean road to socialism.” According to Allende, Chile was an exceptionally stable democracy with a loyal, “constitutionalist” military, making it an ideal country for the peaceful and democratic transition to socialism. As his government assumed power and began implementing its program in practice, this perspective seemed to have been proven correct by events. However, three short years later, General Augusto Pinochet launched a military coup against Allende and installed himself as a bloody capitalist dictator.

Popular frontism

Allende’s “Popular Unity” government was based on a political alliance between the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and several small liberal parties purporting to represent the middle class. These different parties were united around a reformist program and the shared perspective that socialism could be achieved in a cross-class alliance with the “democratic capitalists” through purely legal and “democratic” methods. This is the essence of the “popular front”—and its fatal flaw.

Allende himself was an important member of the Socialist Party and was one of its founding members, having gotten involved during his days as a student activist in the 1930s. A doctor by trade, he was already well known as a friend and political leader of the poor workers and peasants. He served several times as senator and even served a four-year term as Minister of Health, during which he was responsible for several progressive reforms. His 1970 victory was his fourth time running for president, and he won narrowly in a three-way election against two competing capitalist parties.

Once in power, his government began carrying out an unprecedented series of reforms, despite intense resistance from the capitalists. Some of the first acts included raising wages and pensions, freezing rents and prices, lowering the voting age to 18, and guaranteeing families basic goods like milk. Most importantly, the government began making serious inroads on capitalist private property with the nationalization of the copper mines and other natural resources, the partial nationalization of the banks, and the redistribution of thousands of acres of land from the large landowners to the landless peasants.

The exploited masses of Chilean workers and peasants not only greeted these reforms with enthusiastic support but went beyond the government’s plans and began taking things into their own hands. Against the advice of their leaders, the workers and peasants spontaneously occupied many factories and land which had not been slated for nationalization or redistribution by the government. They created various committees and organizations of their own in order to control production, set prices, and manage the distribution of basic goods. If the government had seriously based itself on this movement, it could have abolished capitalism peacefully and raised these organizations to political power, just as the Russian Bolsheviks did in 1917. Instead, however, the government was much more concerned with restraining the movement and keeping it within the narrow limits of constitutional legality.

The counterrevolution arms itself

The capitalists and their lackeys had no such scruples. A coup was being prepared, even before Allende officially became president. With support from the Department of State and CIA, a plot was hatched to kidnap a leading military official while blaming the left, to deny Allende the presidency. This failed, and the plotters were exposed, but the government continued to insist on the neutrality of the armed forces and their loyalty to the constitution.

Once the government came to power, it was subject to an all-sided assault. In parliament, the bourgeois parties carried out a legislative blockade, refusing to vote for any of the government’s proposals. Outside of parliament, the CIA was funding a major propaganda campaign to discredit the government over shortages—while simultaneously sabotaging key sectors of the economy. Most dramatically, the right was able to organize a petty-bourgeois truck owners’ strike against the government, paralyzing the movement of goods.

Behind the scenes, the counterrevolution was arming itself and preparing the coup. Businessmen, military officers, politicians, and the CIA were meeting covertly and planning the government’s downfall. Multiple attempts were made on Allende’s life by armed gangs. Illegal arms, including machine guns and rifles, were flowing into the country in order to arm fascist paramilitary organizations like “Fatherland and Liberty,” who were receiving training from the Chilean and US armed forces. In the navy, a coup plot by the officers was an open secret, soon exposed by a group of left-wing sailors.

Every step of the way, it was the masses who fought back against these attacks, but they did not receive the support of the government. They called for arms, for the dissolution of parliament, and various other measures against the capitalists and counterrevolution, but were repeatedly denied in the name of “compromise” and “legality.” No matter how many provocations the capitalists made, Allende and his government insisted on turning the other cheek.

The coup

Having refused to arm or mobilize the masses to defend the revolution, the government was finally toppled on September 11, 1973. Tanks rolled into the capital and fighter jets bombed the presidential palace. The armed forces had been called on to defend the government, but the general responsible for this defense was the same Augusto Pinochet who was leading the coup.

The government was overthrown, and Allende was killed. Pinochet would rule over Chile for the next 17 years, during which all of the nationalized industries were re-privatized, and thousands of activists were disappeared, tortured, and killed. Although bourgeois democracy would eventually return to Chile, the former regime has never faced justice for its crimes and the country is again wracked by capitalist crisis and political upheaval.

Today, revolution is back on the agenda in Chile and around the world. Communists must not repeat the mistakes of Allende and the popular front. The capitalists will never compromise with the revolution, and they will not hesitate to violate the alleged sanctity of constitutional law in order to protect their profits and their system. Only independent class politics can avert a new catastrophe and ensure the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism once and for all.