Allende and revolutionary democratic socialism

The 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile

Sep 11, 2023

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the principle raw materials export from Chile was copper, and the copper mines were owned by two U.S. companies, the Anaconda Copper Co. and the Kennecott Copper Co., which made enormous profits, while Chilean workers in the mines lived in miserable conditions, earning only a fraction of what workers in the United States doing comparable work were earning. Indeed, from the 1930s through the 1960s, Chilean copper expressed the extreme inequalities of the world-system. On the one hand, during this time period, the two principal companies had remitted four billion dollars from Chile to their corporate headquarters, even though they had not invested more than 800 million dollars, and nearly all this investment came from profits earned in Chile. On the other hand, as expressed by Eduardo Galeano in The Open Veins of Latin America, “Chilean minors lived in narrow and sordid cabins, separated from their families, which inhabited miserable hovels on the outskirts; separated also from the foreign personnel, which in the large mines inhabited a universe apart, a mini-state within the state, where only English was spoken. . . .The average salary in the Chilean mines was one-eighth the basic salary of the refineries of Kennecott in the United States, even though productivity was at the same level.” The taxes paid by the companies to the Chilean state did not begin to compensate for the exhaustion of this non-renewable resource.

Salvador Allende was born in 1908 in Valparaíso, Chile, in a prosperous middle-class family. His father was a lawyer who worked as a public defender; his mother was a devout Catholic and the daughter of professionals who had migrated from France. As a medical student at the University of Chile in Santiago in the late 1920s, Allende became involved in the university reform movement that was sweeping Latin America, and he read the works of Lenin, Marx, and Trotsky. He was imprisoned for speaking out against a 1930 coup d’état, but he was released from prison during a general amnesty preceding the 1932 presidential elections.

By the 1930s, Allende had formulated a vision for Chile of “revolutionary democratic socialism.” He believed that through a broad-based popular movement, such a society could be attained within the context of Chilean constitutional traditions. He was one of the founders of the Socialist Party in 1933, and he was active in forging a “Popular Front,” a coalition of the three parties of the left (Socialist, Communist and Radical). From 1937 to 1970, Allende was elected to the Congress and to the Senate, and for two brief periods served in the executive branch of the government. He was a presidential candidate in 1958, losing by a narrow margin, and he served as president of the Senate from 1964 to 1970.

In the 1970 presidential elections, Allende was the candidate of the Popular Unity, a multiple party coalition consisting of the Socialist, Communist, and Radical parties as well as former members of the Christian Democratic Party who, influenced by liberation theology, had formed a separate organization. Allende won a plurality with 36.3% of the vote, with the candidate of the right-wing National Party receiving 34.9% and the Christian Democratic Party candidate receiving 27.8%. When no candidate receives an absolute majority, Chilean law required that Congress decide on the winner. As a condition for ratifying his election, the opposition parties attained constitutional reforms that limited the authority of the president to appoint commanding officers in the armed forces and to eliminate or replace government functionaries.

Thus, when Allende assumed the presidency on November 3, 1970, it was under conditions in which presidential authority had been reduced, and in addition, his Popular Unity coalition did not have control of the legislative branch. Nevertheless, he was able to implement important components of the Popular Unity platform, including: nationalization of U.S. copper companies; nationalization of public utilities, non-foreign banks, and basic industries; acceleration of a previously-enacted agrarian reform program, which included the distribution of land from large estates to landless peasants; wage increases; a freeze on prices and rents; hospital services for people who could not afford to pay; a free milk program for children; tax breaks and credit for small and medium-sized business.

Allende believed that socialism in Chile must be developed in accordance with the particular conditions in Chile. As he expressed in his first annual message to the Congress on May 21, 1971:

Our task is to define and put into practice, as the Chilean road to socialism, a new model of the state, of the economy and of society which revolves around man´s needs and aspirations. . . . There are no previous experiments that we can use as models; we shall have to develop the theory and practice of new forms of social, political and economic organization, both in order to break with underdevelopment and to create socialism.

For Allende, the construction of socialism involves an independent national development, breaking with the dependent capitalism that was established by colonialism and neocolonialism that Chile and all the peoples of the Third World have endured. He asserts in his Inaugural Address on November 5, 1970:

This victory belongs to the workers, to those who suffered and endured for more than a century and a half, under the name of independence, the exploitation of a ruling class which was unable to provide progress and wasn´t even concerned about it.
     We all know the truth, that the backwardness, ignorance and hunger of our people and of all the peoples of the Third World exist and persist because a few privileged people profit from them.
     But the day has finally come to say enough—enough of economic exploitation, enough of social inequality, enough of political oppression. . . .
     We must say that we, the underdeveloped peoples, have failed in history.
     We were colonies in the agrarian-mercantile civilization. We are barely neocolonial nations in the urban-industrial civilization, and, in the new civilization which threatens to continue our dependency, we have been the exploited peoples—those who existed not for themselves, but rather to contribute to the prosperity of others.
     And what is the reason for our backwardness? Who is responsible for our underdevelopment?
     After many deformations and deceptions, the people have understood. We know from our own experience that the real reasons for our backwardness are to be found in the system, in this dependent capitalist system which counterposes the rich minority to the needy majority internally and the powerful nations to the poor nations externally, a system in which the many make possible the prosperity of the few. . . .
     We have inherited a society which has seen its most deeply felt desire of independent development frustrated, a divided society in which the majority of families are denied the right to work, education, health care, recreation and even the hope of a better future.

In his first annual address to the National Congress, Allende noted the role of the Chilean elite in the development of underdevelopment and poverty.

The causes of backwardness resided and still reside in the traditional ruling classes with their combination of dependence on external forces and internal class exploitation. They have profited from their association with foreign interests, and from their appropriation of the surplus produced by the workers, to whom they have only awarded the minimum indispensable for the renewal of their laboring capacities.

Nationalization was central to the Popular Unity program. In its first year, the Allende government nationalized copper, iron, and nitrate industries, all of them previously owned by U.S. corporations. The U.S. corporations were compensated, but profits in excess of 12% per year since 1955 were deducted from the amount of compensation. The government also nationalized 80 % of the banks, a significant number of manufacturing companies, and 30% of the land. Allende expressed the reasons for the nationalizations in his address to the U.N. General Assembly on December 4, 1972.

The need to place all our economic resources at the service of the people´s tremendous unsatisfied requirements had to go hand in hand with the recovery by Chile of its national dignity. We had to put an end to the situation where we Chileans, struggling against poverty and stagnation, were forced to export huge amounts of capital for the benefit of the most powerful market economy in the world. The nationalization of our basic resources constituted a historic act of reclamation. Our economy could no longer tolerate the state of subordination implied in the concentration of more than 80 percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large, foreign companies that have always placed their own interests before the needs of the countries in which they were making exorbitant profits. Nor could we accept the vicious effects of the latifundia, of the industrial and commercial monopolies, of credit restrictions in favor of only a few, or of brutal inequalities in income distribution.

As Allende expressed in his first annual message to the National Congress, “Chile now has in its government a new political force whose social function is to uphold, not the traditional ruling class, but the vast majority of the people. This change in the power structure must necessarily be accompanied by profound changes in the socioeconomic order.”

The nationalizations were directed toward large companies. The strategy was to leave medium-sized and small companies under private ownership, thus envisioning a mixed economy with public and private sectors.

The Popular Unity program included an acceleration of agrarian reform. A 1967 agrarian reform law had empowered the Executive Branch to expropriate land exceeding 192 acres in the Santiago province and in the rest of the country all land that was idle or poorly cultivated. Under this law, the previous administration had appropriated 1410 plots in three years; the Allende administration expropriated 504 plots in its first six months. The program intended to give priority to the development of cooperative forms of land ownership as a dimension of agrarian reform, and it was to proceed on a premise of respect for land of the indigenous Indian communities.

The government of Salvador Allende had very positive relations with socialist Cuba. Fidel traveled in Chile for three weeks in November 1971, and Allende visited Cuba in December 1972. There are important differences between the socialist projects of the two nations. (1) Socialism in Cuba came to power through an armed struggle against a military dictatorship, whereas socialism in Chile came to power through a constitutionally defined electoral process. (2) The government of socialist Cuba developed the rebel guerrilla army into a Revolutionary Armed Forces. In contrast, the government of socialist Chile sought a social and economic transformation in a context in which it was expected that the armed forces, developed in an earlier system controlled by the elite, would respect the constitutional process. (3) Socialist Cuba developed a single political party to serve as the vanguard of the revolution, and it established elections that were an alternative to the elections of multiple political parties developed in bourgeois democracies. On the other hand, the socialist project in Chile was proceeding in the context of bourgeois institutions of representative democracy.

Both Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro maintained that the differences between the two socialist countries, both in the manner in which the socialist revolutions attained political power and the particular characteristics of their socialist projects, were reflections of the different historical, political, and economic conditions in the two nations. Both affirmed that there is not a single socialist road, but a diversity of paths in accordance with particular conditions.

The government of Salvador Allende was brought to an end by a coup d’état on September 11, 1973, during which Allende died. Army Commander Pinochet was named President, beginning a brutal and repressive dictatorship that lasted nearly 20 years, before it was cast aside by the “transition to democracy” that swept Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. Under Pinochet, Chile was the first country in Latin America to impose the neoliberal project. Much has been written over the role of the United States in trying to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency in 1970, in seeking to destabilize the Allende government, in supporting the September 11, 1973, coup, and in supporting the Pinochet dictatorship.

Allende had believed in the professionalism of the armed forces of Chile, and he therefore thought that the Chilean armed forces would respect the constitutional process. This judgment on his part appears to have been an error. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from this is that the development of popular militias and a revolutionary transformation of the armed forces is an integral and necessary part of developing alternative political and economic structures.

Salvador Allende was an example of the exceptional leaders of the Third World people’s revolutions of the twentieth century, a courageous contributor to the human legacy of knowledge. He livers in the memory of our revolutionary consciousness.

Sources

Cockcroft, James. D., Ed. 2000. Salvador Allende Reader: Chile´s Voice of Democracy. Edited with an introduction by James D. Cockcroft. With translations by Moisés Espinoza and Nancy Nuñez. New York: Ocean Press.

Galeano, Eduardo. 1997. The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 25th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. Forward by Isabel Allende. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Knowledge, ideology, and real socialism in our times

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