Allende's Second Way

[Louis Proyect]

I was just on the phone last night with an old friend who had seen the 2
films Peter is referring to. I told him that I didn't go because I would
have found it too aggravating. The notion that the Chilean army would have
respected democracy is misbegotten. In these films, it would have provided
the same kind of ghastly tension as a slasher film. When would the monster
Pinochet jump out of the closet with an axe in his hand? The audience would
want to yell at the screen. "Don't go there! There's an axe-murderer in the
closet." At least, that's what I would yell at the screen.

The Chilean experience is a negative confirmation of Lenin's "State and
Revolution." He explains that the state is bodies of armed men that defend
the interests of the ruling class. The only way to achieve socialism is to
demolish the old state and replace it with one based on the armed working
class, known in Marxist jargon as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The horrible thing about Chile is not just that it resulted in mass murder,
but it also issued in the long wave of capitalist reaction that we are
finally beginning to break out of. The Chicago School of economics used
Chile as a laboratory and the model was applied elsewhere, from
post-Solidarity Poland, to Bolivia, to Thatcher's England to Yeltsin's Russia.

The best Marxist analysis of Allende's downfall is from the SWP's
Pathfinder Press, titled "Chile's Days of Terror." I also recommend Seymour
Hersch's book on Kissinger which has some explosive revelations about the
role of ITT in fomenting the coup. Finally, for an expose of Pinochet's
economic "miracle," I recommend Joseph Collins's "Chile's Free Market
Miracle: a Second Look," from Food First books.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)