2023-09-13 14:53:42
«This article is part of the Special Magazine of 50 years of the 1973 coup published by the International Workers Movement in Chile. If you are interested in reading the full magazine, go to
Before entering into the study of our history, it is essential that we locate a central aspect of the Popular Unity program that will appear throughout this magazine and that will allow us to understand what happened in ’73. As we will explain in other texts, the Popular Unity program had as its axis proposing a “peaceful path towards socialism.”
By Otávio Calegari – WITH Chile
For Popular Unity, the revolutionary process of the 70s was an anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic bourgeois-democratic revolution. Thus, they stated that in the first moment of the revolution, it was necessary to guarantee the country’s independence from imperialism and strengthen sectors of the “independent” Chilean bourgeoisie, while improving the living conditions of the people, nationalizing a large part of the strategic industries. , carrying out an agrarian reform and democratizing State institutions. This first stage of the revolution would open the way, in a future time, for the transition towards socialism. Thus, the main parties of the UP – the PS and the PC – defended that Chile would follow a particular path towards socialism, the peaceful transition, since the military and the people were prepared to respect the “will of the majority” expressed through elections.
This strategy was opposed to previous experiences of worker and socialist revolutions, such as the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution and the Cuban Revolution, to name the three most important. In all these cases, the seizure of power by the workers (in Russia) or by peasant-based parties (Cuban guerrilla and Chinese CP), had occurred outside of bourgeois legality, that is, through a violent clash between social classes. The Russian Revolution was the least violent at the beginning (on the day of the seizure of power by the Bolshevik party – which led the working class and the Army troops – only 3 people died, run over). However, after a few months, a bloody civil war began that lasted several years, due to the reaction of the Russian bourgeoisie and monarchy associated with the imperialist countries.
In the Russian Revolution, after the seizure of power by the workers’ councils (soviets) led by the Bolshevik party, a period of dictatorship of the proletariat. That dictatorship was not contra the proletariat, but centrally against the bourgeois and monarchical reaction. His newspapers were banned, his companies nationalized and most of his privileges disappeared. For the working class and the people, the first years of the Russian revolution were one of intense democracy, with the emergence of thousands of new organizations in the countryside, neighborhoods, organizations of women, youth, the military and workers. The soviets were the main channels of that broad democracy, where everything was decided and implemented, where laws were made and their application was monitored. Thus, bourgeois powers (courts, police, executive power, parliament, etc.) disappeared and workers’ power appeared.
In the other revolutions of a socialist nature, such as China (1949) or Cuba (1959), there was not that same democracy for the workers, because the organizations that took power were not supported by democratic organizations of the masses and they quickly became bureaucratized, taking top-level decisions and without strengthening the true democracy of the workers. For this reason, we say that in those countries there was no true dictatorship of the proletariat, but rather bureaucratic dictatorships of the PCs, which were based on the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in those countries and on enormous conquests of the masses, but which pointed in the opposite direction. to socialism. Those dictatorships (Mao, Stalin, Castro) paved the way for the restoration of capitalism some decades later.
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