SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too)
“Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; OR, the VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.” Rosa Luxemburg
Before the eyes of the whole world, Israel is carrying out a crime of monumental proportions: a deliberate and systematic massacre of the women and children of Gaza.
The Netanyahu government has murdered 20,000 Gazans in two months: 10,000 of them children and over 5,000 women.
The aim of this criminal regime is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and drive those who remain into the desert.
Gaza’s entire population of 2.2 million is being starved and deprived of water. The vast majority, over 80 percent, have been displaced from their homes. In just two months, one out of every 115 people in Gaza has been killed. At the present rate, one out of every 20 Gazans will be dead within a year.
“I feel like I’m running out of ways to describe the horrors hitting children here,” UNICEF Spokesman James Elder said. “I feel like I’m almost failing in my ability to convey the endless killing of children.”
Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, after having visited Gaza, declared, “The things I saw there are beyond anything that anyone should be in a position to describe. What shocked me the most were the children with atrocious injuries, and at the same time having lost their parents with no one looking after them.”
On October 16, Israel instructed one million people living in northern Gaza to flee to the south. Now, the population is once again being told to flee from portions of southern Gaza amid the deadliest bombing campaign to date. Israel’s goal, as outlined in a leaked paper by the intelligence ministry, is to create the conditions in which Gaza, previously one of the most densely populated areas in the world, is incapable of supporting human life, creating the conditions for the displacement of the Gazan population into the Sinai Desert.
Israel has deliberately carried out a campaign to target all places of refuge, from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south. It has systematically bombed and raided hospitals, displacing doctors, patients and refugees at gunpoint. Those too weak to move have simply been abandoned to die, including five premature babies whose bodies were discovered last week after they were abandoned to die alone at Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital.
By every definition, Israel’s actions are a textbook case of genocide. The Rome Statute defines “genocide” as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” This includes:
“Killing members of the group”—20,000 Gazans have been killed over the past two months.
“Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”—41,316 Gazans have been injured.
“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Israel’s blockade has blocked the entry of food, water and medical care, leading to famine and the surge of preventable disease.
The UN framework on genocide identifies “signs of an intent to destroy in whole or in part a protected group” as being a key indicator that a genocide is taking place. Such statements by Israeli officials abound:
The statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” citing the Biblical passage that commands, “put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
The declaration by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
The declaration by Israeli Security Cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter that “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba”—referring to the forcible displacement of the population of Palestine from their lands in 1948.
The urging by former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon that the population of Gaza “Go to the Sinai Desert.”
The call by Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, to destroy the hospital system because “Severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”
This genocide is not a spontaneous response to the October 7 attack against Israel but rather a conspiracy years in the making. Last week, the New York Times reported the existence of leaked documents showing that the Netanyahu government possessed detailed advance knowledge of the Hamas battle plan for the October 7 attack. The Netanyahu regime decided to carry out a stand-down of the military and intelligence forces on that day, to create a pretext for its ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The genocide not only has the support of the imperialist powers but is being carried out with their direct participation. It is likely that some victims of the genocide were murdered not only with American bombs, but directly by troops from NATO countries. Amid widespread reports of American and British troops on the ground in Gaza, the British government refused to answer a question by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn about whether UK troops are deployed on the ground.
US officials have repeatedly made clear that there are no “red lines” for the number of people Israel will be allowed to kill, and US President Joe Biden has declared that there is “no prospect” of a ceasefire.
Appearing on the “Meet the Press” Sunday talk show, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was asked if there would be “consequences ... if the United States feels as though Israel is not following a specific plan to protect civilians?” To this, Kirby replied, “We’re going to continue to support Israel as they go after Hamas. The security assistance continues to flow. That’s not going to change.”
Kirby defended Israel’s targeting of the civilian population, declaring, “They have actually given civilians in Gaza a list, a map—it’s online—a list of areas where they can go to be more safe. There’s not too many modern militaries, in advance of conducting operations, that would actually do that.”
In effect, the United States argues that, since Israel is not only massacring the population of Gaza but also displacing it, Israel’s actions are acceptable.
The precedents of Israel’s genocide were seen in the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan—in the sieges of Fallujah and Mosul. But this is a new level of criminality: The world is seeing imperialism in its most brutal and naked form.
The entire world can see that all the invocations of human rights by the imperialist powers have been nothing but lies and deceit.
Millions of people have taken part in mass demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza. In response, the governments involved in the genocide have carried out an unprecedented and sweeping effort to criminalize political opposition.
The British, French and German governments have all attempted to ban demonstrations against the genocide and carried out mass arrests. In the United States, the entire Senate has voted to equate opposition to the genocide as support for terrorism. Universities have shut down student groups protesting the genocide and attempted to block demonstrations. Technology companies, at the behest of governments, have imposed a sweeping regime of mass censorship.
The world’s so-called “democracies” are making it illegal to oppose genocide.
It is absolutely futile to make appeals to the criminal imperialist governments implicated in the Gaza massacre. Stopping the genocide in Gaza is the task of the working class. Workers should support the call by the Palestinian trade unions not to handle war materiel destined for Israel. The global demonstrations by millions of people against the genocide must be expanded and armed with a socialist perspective.
The struggle to put an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza must be waged as a struggle against the imperialist governments that are responsible for it and the capitalist system whose barbarism is being put on hideous display before the world.
A WSWS reporting team interviewed participants at Wednesday's protest outside the CU Morningside campus. Andrew, an international student who studies architecture at CU, said the following:
“I’m here to protest and fight against the brutal Israeli occupation. Also I want to show Columbia University that we can’t be silenced by shutting down our clubs. Columbia University is one of the most important place to protest, as it is the beacon of the Democratic Party.”
Referring to the “March for Israel” event on Tuesday which was staged by pro-Israeli elements of the American state, Andrew said, “[i]t’s crazy that this pro-Israel protest on [Tuesday] in Washington D.C. was led by a guy who was himself an antisemite!” He was referring to John Hagee, one of the featured speakers, a Christian fundamentalist pastor.
I’m also aware of the fact that the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to a former S.S. member. Canada is one of the few countries that has been vetoing all diplomatic proceedings that in any way support Palestine.
It’s shocking to me that Bernie didn’t support a ceasefire. Sanders used to be the one person who used to give me hope. But now, he, and the rest of the opposition within the establishment, they all say nice things, and of course, I agree with the nice things that they say. But they are all part of the system. They are part of Washington D.C. They are one minor voice that is part of the machine. This international protest movement, on the other hand, has much more powerful potential to change things.
Christina, a Columbia alum who studied sociology, also spoke to the WSWS about the actions of the former women’s college, Barnard College, a unit of Columbia..
I was following the response of Barnard to this situation, and their creation of their antisemitism task force. I guess I support that, but what about the need for an Islamophobia task force? These forces are interlinked. It’s not like one is against the other.
The charge that anti-Zionism equals anti-Judaism is the Israeli propaganda machine trying to conflate two things that are not the same. They do it because if they push that claim, then no one would want to come out as anti-Israel out of fear of being branded as antisemitic.
People are calling Biden ‘Genocide Joe.’ I think that what is happening really shows that the position of the American president, no matter who you are, you’re going to end up being a war criminal. Because the US president has to uphold American imperialism.
You can’t really change the system from within. No matter who the leaders are, no matter how liberal they all claim to be, empty promises will be made, and the people will be betrayed.
Biden claims he’s a president for all the people... but then, clearly with his support of Israel, he’s really trying to do damage control. He’s sending billions of tax dollars over there… It’s this age-old conversation, we always have money for war, but we don’t have money for healthcare, for housing, for education, and all of these other social problems.
There’s also this idea that politics in the US will always be within the binary, two-party system, but that’s kind of what the oppressors want you to think. Governments are not going to concede anything without the power of the people and mass movements.
What does Israel do for the US that merits such lavish support?
First and foremost, Israel kept the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow at bay during the Cold War with its defeats of Egypt and Syria, both of whom were armed by the Soviet Union, in 1967 and 1973. It prevented victories by the Palestinians and their supporters beyond Israel’s borders: in Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon 1976-82—where it supported the fascistic Christian Phalange against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its Shiite allies in the Lebanese civil war that raged between 1975-90—as well as in the occupied territories. It thus helped to suppress the Arab working class and maintain the decrepit and corrupt bourgeois national regimes in power.
Aftermath of massacre of Palestinians directed by Lebanese Forces with the complicity of senior members of the Israeli Cabinet and Defence Forces and conducted by Christian Phalangists and members of the South Lebanon Army in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. [Photo: Robin Moyer, USA, Black Star for Time. Beirut, Lebanon, 18 September 1982. ]
In effect, Israel replaced Britain after its withdrawal “east of Suez” as the policeman of the Middle East on behalf of US imperialism.
A crime of monumental dimensions, comparable to those committed by the Nazis, is now unfolding before the eyes of the world. The more than two million people in Gazaare threatened with genocide. The Israeli government is subjecting them to systematic starvation and dehydration in advance of an imminent ground invasion.
All over the world, masses of workers and youth are shocked and revolted by the horrors being unleashed on the Palestinian population, with over one million people protesting throughout the world this past week. With the fate of millions of Palestinians now hanging in the balance, it is urgent that this opposition be expanded through industrial action by the working class.
The Netanyahu regime intends to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth. The deadline the Israeli military gave Thursday for the evacuation of 1.1 million people in northern Gaza has expired. Hundreds of thousands of people are desperately seeking to escape south, while hundreds of thousands more remain in Gaza City.
What is taking place is a war crime, directed at the entire population of Gaza. Gaza has been subjected to a blockade on food, water and fuel that began on October 9, which itself is a war crime under international law. Phillippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, said that “the scale and speed of the unfolding humanitarian crisis is bone-chilling. Gaza is fast becoming a hell-hole and is on the brink of collapse.”
Lazzarini stated that there is a severe shortage of drinking water—the most basic requirement for survival—for 650,000 people. Without immediate access to fuel to produce safe drinking water, he said, “People will start dying of severe dehydration, among them young children, the elderly and women. Water is now the last remaining lifeline.”
The health system in Gaza is collapsing. On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a statement that it “strongly condemns Israel’s repeated orders for the evacuation of 22 hospitals treating more than 2,000 inpatients in northern Gaza. The forced evacuation of patients and health workers will further worsen the current humanitarian and public health catastrophe.”
“The lives of many critically ill and fragile patients hang in the balance,” the WHO stated, including “those in intensive care or who rely on life support; patients undergoing hemodialysis; newborns in incubators; women with complications of pregnancy, and others all face imminent deterioration of their condition or death if they are forced to move and are cut off from life-saving medical attention while being evacuated.”
The WHO said that Israel's demand that hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated was a “death sentence.”
The death toll from seven days of Israeli air strikes is officially at 2,215, including over 500 children, while over 8,700 people have been injured. The relentless bombardment is intended to prepare the way for a direct invasion. On Saturday, the Israeli military said that hundreds of thousands of troops on the border with Gaza were preparing for “a significant ground operation” and “an integrated and coordinated attack from the air, sea and land.”
The American and European governments are entirely and fully complicit in this unfolding genocide. All have issued statements fully backing Israel in its homicidal campaign.
Asked Friday if Israel is “retaliating in a fury,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken replied, “What Israel is doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people … I think any country faced with what Israel has suffered would likely do the same thing.” The previous day, asked if there were any “red lines” that Israel could not cross, Blinken simply replied, “We’re determined to support them.”
US State Department messages obtained by the Huffington Post instruct diplomats not to use terms such as “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end the violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm,” in press materials. In the early days of the Israeli onslaught, tweets from the State Department suggesting a ceasefire were deleted.
The Biden administration is encouraging and promoting genocide. In a signal of its direct military involvement in operations in Gaza, the Pentagon on Saturday ordered a second aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Despite the relentless, lying propaganda campaign of the mass media, the sympathy of the vast majority of the world’s population is with the Palestinians, who have been subject to decades of oppression and persecution.
The strength of the working class in every country must be mobilized to stop the developing genocide against more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, and the complicity of imperialist government in the US, Canada, Australia and throughout Europe. Mass demonstrations and protests should be called in cities and on college campuses throughout the world.
Re the #Gaza uprising, Trotsky's words are timely:
“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains–let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
In June 1933, just months after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Leon Trotsky, the great co-leader of the Russian Revolution, called attention to the fact that even in an age of rapid technological development, the most backward conceptions can flourish. Commenting on this contradiction between scientific advance and social backwardness amid the death agony of capitalism, Trotsky wrote:
Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery!
One of the peculiar elements of the present period is that mankind’s vast technological advances are not understood by a signficant section of the population, who have been deprived of an elementary understanding of the scientific method. The capitalist ruling elites prey upon and cultivate fear and ignorance.
Nevertheless, the force of human progress is far greater, to the extent that science becomes rooted in the working class. Mankind’s scientific achievements are inexhaustible and all of the problems we confront can be overcome. The great barrier is the existing social relations, based on private ownership of the means of production and the division of the world into rival nation-states.
The conflict with anti-vaccine elements is not a debate within the scientific community. It is a struggle of genuine scientists and all representatives of progressive thought against ignorance, fear, cultural backwardness and the most dangerous forms of contemporary political reaction.
The Marxist attitude to scientific advance and innovation is infused with confidence in human progress. The vast potential of mRNA technology itself is only beginning to emerge. AMay 2022 reportinNaturenoted, “mRNA-based therapeutics are expected to become a powerful therapy for a variety of refractory diseases, including infectious diseases, metabolic genetic diseases, cancer, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and other diseases.”
The full blossoming of this potential, alongside the flowering of every scientific discipline, requires the socialist reorganization of the global economy and society as a whole. Pfizer, Moderna and all other pharmaceutical giants must be internationalized and retooled to provide free treatments for all. The trillions squandered on war and the financial oligarchy must be seized and reallocated to provide for social needs--above all, public health, reversing climate change and guaranteeing high quality education and living standards to all of humanity.
William Lehman works at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and he ran for UAW president in 2022, winning almost 5,000 votes. He is currently suing the U.S. Department of Labor for a rerun of the election over voter suppression.
On Friday, President Biden spoke from the White House about the autoworkers' strike, calling for the car corporations and the United Auto Workers to reach a "win-win" agreement for workers.
"Record profits have not been shared fairly, in my view, with those workers," Biden said. "Workers deserve a fair share of the benefits they helped create for an enterprise."
Biden's remarks raise fundamental questions about the distribution of wealth in the United States. Much more than a contract dispute is involved.
Workers' wages at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis have declined dramatically over the past 50 years. In 1973, autoworkers received an average hourly wage of $5.54 an hour—more than $38 an hour in today's dollars. If that wage had merely kept up with inflation (setting aside the massive increases in productivity over that time), autoworkers would be making nearly $40 an hour today.
But today temporary workers at GM start at $16.67 and top out at $20, half as much as workers five decades ago. Should temps be lucky enough to be given full-time status, their top pay is capped at just over $32 an hour, which it takes eight long years to reach.
Another comparison: GM CEO Mary Barra received a $28.9 million compensation package in 2022. She made approximately $2.4 million a month, $550,000 a week, $110,000 a day, or an "hourly" rate of nearly $13,800. It would take a temporary worker making the maximum $20 an hour almost three years to make as much as Barra does in a single day.
The difference between the two, however, is that every penny of Barra's pay package is ultimately derived from the value produced by the labor of the working class.
How can Biden's "fair share" be distributed between a corporate executive making $13,894 an hour and a temp making $20 an hour?
The conventional argument made by champions of the "free market" system is that executives are paid for their "performance," by which is meant their ability to deliver for Wall Street. They make millions because the shareholders receive billions.
And how much profit have the companies made? In 2022, GM, Ford, and Stellantis made a combined $77 billion in gross profit.
If that $77 billion were to be distributed among all 150,000 Big Three autoworkers in the US, each worker would receive a bonus of roughly $513,333.
Of course, GM, Stellantis, and Ford employ many tens of thousands more workers around the world, and their labor is also exploited to produce the billions which accrue to the shareholders. There are also the vast supply chains, workers throughout the auto parts plants, who are integral to the productive process.
The president claims that a "win-win" contract for workers and the corporate owners can be reached. But Biden, the veteran capitalist politician, knows that's impossible. What the president is trying to cover up is that workers and the corporate oligarchy have fundamentally irreconcilable class interests. There is no "fair share" in a set-up in which investors get billions, executives get millions, and workers get pennies.
There is an approaching day of reckoning with social realities that have long been concealed and covered up. Workers are increasingly aware of the vastly unequal society in which they live and are looking for a way to change it. That's why when I ran as a socialist in the UAW's 2022 elections, I received 5,000 votes from autoworkers, despite efforts by the union apparatus to suppress the vote, resulting in a turnout of just 9 percent.
UAW President Shawn Fain has taken to denouncing "corporate greed" and the "billionaire class." In reality, Fain and the union bureaucracy he oversees serve an essential function on behalf of the corporations. They block or limit strikes (as they are currently doing, isolating a walkout at the Big Three to just three plants) and enforce the demands of management, imposing one sellout, concessionary contract after the other for the past 45 years. For these services, the bureaucrats receive their own payouts, including six-figure salaries that put them in the top 5 percent of income earners, an affluent upper-middle class.
The White House and the UAW leadership have been in constant communication for months, closely coordinating their strategy and talking points, with both Biden and Fain repeating the same stock phrases about a "fair share" ad nauseum.
Trump, the fascist demagogue, is seeking to capture growing discontent among workers, particularly over the looming jobs bloodbath related to electric vehicles. To stop workers from directing their anger at the corporations, he scapegoats workers in Mexico and China for layoffs and plant closures.
What Biden, Trump, and Fain all fear is that inequality is driving the working class in the United States towards socialist politics—that is, a political perspective based upon workers' independent class interests.
Capitalism is showing masses of workers that it is at war with their basic needs. Inflation, the unrestrained transmission of COVID-19, deadly working conditions, the climate crisis, and the threat of nuclear world war are confronting workers all over the world. More and more workers are seeing the need to overturn this entire system and bring about one in which social need, not private profit, determine how society's resources are organized.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the infamous CIA-backed military coup in Chile led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which established one of the most brutal regimes of the second half of the 20th century.
In the early morning hours of September 11, 1973, the three branches of the Chilean armed forces and the military police issued a radio announcement that they had taken control of the country and demanded the resignation of elected President Salvador Allende of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition government.
The Army and Air Force laid siege to the La Moneda presidential palace, bombarding it with fighter jets and tanks. Cornered and refusing the coup leaders’ demand that he resign, Allende died at La Moneda, according to investigations from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
On the same day, the military rounded up tens of thousands of workers and youth, herding them into concentration camps where they were interrogated, tortured and in many cases murdered. The famous musician Victor Jara described the terror he experienced with thousands of others during his last days in the Estadio Chile, where he was sadistically tortured and murdered on September 16:
How much humanity exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain, moral pressure, terror, insanity?
Six of us were lost as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I never could have believed a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror: one jumped into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall, but all with the fixed look of death.
What horror the face of Fascism creates!
A vast operation orchestrated by the CIA and US military intelligence was launched to smash all workers and peasant organizations, and to hunt down, detain, torture and kill their leaders and militant rank-and-file workers, who were abandoned by the Allende government, without weapons, training or political leadership to resist.
The Pinochet regime, in the following months and years, sold off nearly two-thirds of Chile’s key copper industry nationalized under Allende and his predecessor, privatized sections of banking, the telephone company, metalworks and other companies placed under state control by Allende, returned factories and land taken by workers to private owners, privatized water, pensions, healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, and other sectors. Taxes and regulations were cut to the bone to turn the country into a playground for the emerging transnational corporations and the local oligarchy. The regime followed the instructions of the “free market” economist Milton Friedman and the so-called “Chicago boys”, Friedman-trained acolytes from the University of Chicago who were sent to Chile to oversee the wave of privatizations and brutal attacks on the conditions of the working class.
The fascist terror in Chile lasted for two long decades. Thousands of political opponents were killed or “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, and around 30,000 tortured, according to official figures. The coup in Chile also had profound consequences for the whole Latin America.
The Chilean military's rise to power followed a series of coups sponsored by US imperialism, including in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971 and Uruguay earlier in 1973. The Brazilian military regime, recognized by the Nixon administration as an instrument for US operations, worked systematically to prepare the Chilean military to overthrow Allende.
After the coup in Chile, this counter-revolutionary network coordinated by the CIA in South America was consolidated under what was dubbed Operation Condor. It systematically spread repression, torture and political assassinations across the region and facilitated new coups, most notably the rise of the fascist military regime in Argentina in 1976.
Fifty years after Chile’s horrific September 11, its political relevance is becoming ever more urgent. The specter of dictatorship and military intervention in the politics of Latin America, after a brief cycle of civilian regimes over the last 30 years, haunts the entire region once again.
US imperialism served as the principal patron of the Latin American dictatorships. It remains a central player in the region. Under conditions in which the US ruling class is hurtling toward a new world war, it is openly fighting to secure its geo-strategic hegemony in 'its own backyard,” cultivating relations with the region’s military commands, independently of its elected governments.
In their tributes to the anniversary of the 1973 coup in Chile, the bourgeois nationalist representatives of the “Pink Tide,” such as Chilean President Gabriel Boric, as well as the petty bourgeois pseudo-left, are issuing appeals for new “national pacts” and for the restoration of a popular facade for the region’s bankrupt capitalist regimes. This political path can lead only to a repetition of Pinochet-style coups on an even more horrific scale.
The new generation of workers and youth who are entering the path of revolutionary struggle against capitalism must urgently assimilate the lessons of the Chilean coup that the pseudo-left is working to conceal.
The violence utilized by the Chilean fascist junta demonstrated the ruthlessness with which the ruling class is prepared to employ to defend its power.
The Chilean revolution betrayed
But what took place in 1973 in Chile was not only a bloody US-backed military coup that overthrew an elected government.
There was a powerful proletarian revolutionary upsurge under way in Chile, whose defeat under the jackboots of the military was by no means inevitable. The coming to power of a fascist-military junta was the product of the failure of the working class to seize political power when it was able to, as a result of the criminal betrayals of its Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships, with the indispensable aid of the Pabloite renegades from Trotskyism.
Allende’s UP coalition, formed by the Socialists and Stalinists together with “left” Christian Democrats and Radicals, was elected in 1970 amid a massive upsurge of working class and peasant struggles. Answering the historical conditions of misery and oppression by imperialism and a protracted inflationary crisis, those struggles took radicalized forms such as factory occupations and land expropriations.
As it took office, the UP sought at all costs to discipline the insurrectionary movement of the workers and peasants and subordinate it to the bourgeois state. Calling it the “Chilean road to socialism,” Allende insisted that, based upon its century of “parliamentary democracy”, Chile was an exception to the laws of history established by Marx and Engels and given flesh and blood in the course of the 1917 Revolution in Russia. In Chile, he claimed, the revolutionary process would follow a unique course, growing within the structures of the old state. He insisted that the Armed Forces and the military police in Chile were the “people in uniform” and a “granite foundation of the revolutionary process”, “just as much” as the “workers and their unions”.
While the UP worked to appease the working class by carrying out limited nationalizations and social reforms, the Chilean bourgeoisie and the imperialists gained time to prepare the overthrow of the government and the crushing of the working class. The road to September 11, 1973 was paved with the ceaseless attacks on the working class and several military incursions and direct coup attempts.
In October1972, the ruling class, working in direct collaboration with the Nixon administration and the CIA, attempted to strangle the country economically by promoting a massive employers’ lockout. Workers responded by establishing numerous coordinadores, cordones industriales and other local networks of rank-and-file industrial, neighborhood and self-defense organs to maintain production and distribution of essential goods and oppose fascist provocateurs. Demands to place the whole of the economy and political power directly in workers’ hands became widespread.
In face of the independent development of the workers’ movement, the UP government acted to disarm the working class and secure bourgeois rule in Chile. Allende brought the military into his cabinet, which was also joined by the trade union leaders of the CUT dominated by the Stalinists and Socialists. The government enforced an Arms Control Act to take arms away from workers and peasants, freed fascist agitators, and returned numerous occupied factories to their previous owners.
In June 1973, a rebel wing of the Army made a failed coup attempt by sending a column of tanks against the presidential palace, an episode which became known as the Tanquetazo. The UP’s response was to deepen its concessions, naming Pinochet commander-in-chief of the Army and bringing him into Allende’s cabinet.
Only the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fought consistently to expose the role played by Allende’s government and his apologists in disarming the working class in the face of the clear danger of a military coup organized by US imperialism.
Drawing the lessons in the days immediately after the coup, the ICFI declared in a statement issued on September 18, 1973:
“Defend your democratic rights not through Popular Fronts and parliament, but through the overthrow of the capitalist state and the establishment of workers’ power. Place no confidence in Stalinism, social democracy, centrism, revisionism or the liberal bourgeoisie, but build a revolutionary party of the Fourth International whose program will be the revolution in permanence.”
While it was the Stalinists and Social Democrats who directly led the Chilean workers to defeat, the Pabloite revisionists played a crucial role in enabling these crisis-ridden bureaucratic leaderships to maintain their domination over the working masses.
The Chilean Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Workers Revolutionary Party - POR) was among the organizations that betrayed Trotskyism, joining the American Socialist Workers Party in breaking with the ICFI and reuniting with the Pabloites. Praising the middle class forces “liberated by the Cuban Revolution” as “the ones who will unleash the revolution in each country” of Latin America, the POR immediately dissolved itself and joined the Castroites and Maoists to form the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement-MIR) in 1965.
The MIR played a fundamental role in the disruption of the Chilean revolution, standing in the way of the building of a genuine revolutionary party in the working class. As the conflict between the Chilean working class and the UP’s popular front developed, many workers breaking from Social Democracy and Stalinism came to the MIR, only to be reoriented to “putting pressure” on the government to realize their demands.
The fundamental lesson of the Chilean defeat was that the working class was willing and able to have taken political power, but it lacked the decisive element of a revolutionary leadership, a party based upon Trotskyism and the assimilation of the bitter lessons of the 20th century.
In the initial years of the second decade of the 21st century, which have witnessed the outbreak of the greatest crisis in the history of world capitalism, there is no question that the working class is once again entering upon the path of revolutionary struggles. The globalization of production, the massive growth of the working class worldwide and the powerful developments in technology and communications have created highly favorable conditions for the construction of international socialism.
But to wage successful struggles for power, workers in every country must assimilate the lessons that were written in blood by the heroic Chilean proletariat half a century ago. Above all, this means building in every country sections of the world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International.
