2023-09-18 12:15:21
By Olga Rojas
Introduction.
In this article, we will try to take a brief overview of the different political times of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) until its breakup, with the aim of reaching some conclusions from a Marxist perspective, which will be an initial contribution to continue elaborating.
We claim the revolutionary disposition and militant dedication of the members of the MIR. We vindicate aspects of their policy, such as their confrontation with the conception of the “peaceful path to socialism”, which led them to foresee, correctly, the danger of the coup and, in no way do we equate them to the PC and the PS, in terms of to the responsibility for the historic defeat suffered by the working class and the Chilean masses. But, despite that, our balance is critical, since we consider the MIR’s general strategy against the Chilean revolution to be wrong.
The 4 important political moments of the MIR, in which we see general problems of its strategic project. These 4 moments are the following: 1) The MIR at its founding, which was characterized by its political-programmatic heterogeneity due to the fusion of different sectors; 2) the MIR throughout the Popular Unity government, which was characterized by greater closeness to the government, despite criticism; 3) The MIR during the dictatorship, which was characterized by its Strategy of the Prolonged People’s War, its focused tactics; 4) The crisis and breakup of the MIR, which has as an important factor of debate the approval or not of the group’s guerrilla-focussed actions.
Foundation and principles
The MIR was founded in 1965, during the Frei government, in the heat of the experience of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution (1959), and as an attempt at an alternative to the disappointment with the pro-Moscow Communist Parties (PCs).
Since its foundation there has been a strategic lack of definition, expressed in the contradictions between its central documents: the Declaration of Principles1 and the Military Political Thesis2.
The Declaration of Principles, among other things, indicates that:
It recognizes the proletariat as the revolutionary vanguard class that must win the peasants, intellectuals, technicians and impoverished middle class to its cause. Imperialism will not be overthrown by mere economic competition between opposing social regimes in a formal world of peaceful coexistence, but by socialist revolution in the bastions of imperialism itself. He therefore rejects “the theory of stages”, which wrongly states that we must first wait for a bourgeois-democratic stage led by the “progressive” bourgeoisie, before the proletariat takes power. He combats any conception that encourages illusions in the “progressive bourgeoisie” and practices class collaboration. He emphatically maintains that the only class capable of carrying out “democratic” tasks combined with socialist tasks is the proletariat, putting itself at the head of the peasants and the impoverished middle class. He rejects the theory of the “peaceful way” because it politically disarms the proletariat and because it is inapplicable, since the bourgeoisie itself is the one that will resist, even with the totalitarian dictatorship and civil war, before peacefully handing over power. He reaffirms the Marxist-Leninist principle that the only way to overthrow the capitalist regime is armed insurrection.
On the other hand, the Theses, among other things, stated:
That the experience of the Russian revolution of going through an economic general strike, then a political one, and then the insurrection to take power has not been repeated. If not, rather cases like the Cuban one occur, where the guerrilla comes without a workers’ strike. He explains that Chile is a centrally urban country, although he indicates that the rural component is very important. From this he gives a second fighting option: insurrectionary centers and guerrilla warfare. To do this, he explains that urban areas are less effective due to greater repression and the short duration of the struggles. He then claims the rural guerrilla, aided by the urban-rural guerrilla. The importance of doing work on the Armed Forces to weaken the enemy and acquire supplies. Simultaneously, he demands the creation of a Revolutionary Army. He speaks of the “Preparation and organization of the insurrection”, establishing that to prepare it, guerrilla foci and armed actions must be created, even if they are in a first defensive stage. To justify he uses a quote from Mao Zedong “learn from war through war which is our main method”. He speaks of the conquest of power, referring to it as armed insurrection. At another point he speaks of the need to destroy the bourgeois State. That, to begin the first defensive stage of guerrilla foci, there must be support from the population to carry out the action, or at least not reject it. In addition, there must be a “mature revolutionary party.” He vindicates the role of armed minorities: “The history of the great social struggles in the world and the analysis of the revolutionary struggles of this century reliably demonstrate the role that determined minorities with their revolutionary program have had in the development of the aforementioned conditions.s”
The contradictions between these two central documents have to do with the heterogeneity of the organization, since the formation of the MIR comes from a fusion of different previous political currents: anarcho-syndicalists (some of them Christians, such as Clotario Blest), Maoists, Trotskyists (like Luis Vitale) and Guevarists (like Miguel Enríquez). An expression of this heterogeneity is that the Founding Congress approved: 1) the previous Declaration of Principles drafted by the Trotskyist sector (Luis Vitale); 2) a Strategic Program proposed by Clotario Blest; 3) some organic documents proposed by the PSP and VRM organizations; and 4) the Military Political Thesis written by Miguel Enríquez.
Broadly speaking, no matter how similar concepts may be seen, it is evident that Vitale’s Declaration of Principles and Enríquez’s Theses have logics and strategies of opposing classes. This is because one speaks of the proletariat as the vanguard of the revolution, and the other speaks of the center being the rural guerrilla, denying the centrality of the industrial zones of the labor movement. The first speaks of a process in the style of what the Russian revolution was and the second takes the path of the Cuban revolution, denying the Russian model (“a process that first has workers’ strikes will not occur again”).
1 MIR Declaration of PrinciplesSeptember 1965. Available in:
2 Political-Military Thesis of 1965Miguel Enriquez in The Revolutionary Constituent Assembly, Marco Álvarez Vergara. LOM, 2015.
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