In the following we re-share a document of the Red Fraction of the Communist Party of Chile in an unofficial and preliminary translation, which was previously published on Communist International (CI-IC.org).
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
ON THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN CHILE
“Finally, the so-called “legitimisation” as a political objective of the counter-subversive war, in its form known as “low intensity warfare”, insofar as it seeks governments that come out of elections as a means of “giving them legitimacy” and “authority” recognised by the people; apart, they say, from “serving the needs of the people”. Elections are thus an instrument of the counter-revolutionary war.” (“Elections No! People’s War Yes!, I Crucial Elections for Reaction”. Chairman Gonzalo, PCP, 1990)
“Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented, by outworn institutions, from satisfying itself.” (Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, Engels 1851)
Introduction
Following the counter-insurgency road map imposed by the US State Department on Chile back in the 1980s, a new government of opportunism has begun on March 11, 2022, a social-democratic government all along the line (including the revisionist Tellier-Carmona clique). A new government, yes, but an old and rotten state, a state that is nothing but a joint dictatorship of big bourgeoisie and landowners in the service of US imperialism mainly. This government of opportunism and its extensive electoral agenda is a response to the deep political and economic crisis, or rather the general crisis, facing Chilean society, a crisis which also helps to explain the readjustment of this state which is being attempted by means of a Constitutional Convention, that factory of illusions which oozes parliamentary cretinism from every pore.
This new government and the convention correspond to the need of imperialism’s reactionary lackey classes to slow down, contain and divert the revolutionary upsurge of the masses, thus serving the strategy of low intensity warfare that the imperialists apply to the Chilean semi-colony. This necessity in turn translates into counter-revolutionary tasks which they have been carrying out in the midst of contradictions, struggling or colluding to show who can best serve these tasks.
Context
Following the wave of violent protests and rebellions unfolding worldwide, a popular uprising exploded in the country on 18 October 2019 and lasted for several weeks. The uprising of historic proportions tellurically shook the country to its foundations. Its mainly spontaneous nature did not prevent the organised forces of the people from developing, and the rebellion was an important impetus for them.
The deep cracks opened by the “social explosion” showed the deep general crisis in which Chilean society is struggling. A crust of economic growth has been cracked by the blows of popular anger. On the other hand, the revolt showed the fecundity of mass violence, of revolutionary mass violence, revealing forcefully the full validity of the need for revolution, for a revolution of new democracy. The way of the people is revolution.
The rebellion accelerated historical time (the old mole dared again) and the sharp class struggle shook the reactionary classes and their representatives out of the deep laziness in which they had become mired with the binominal and the new trinominal; suddenly, when nothing seemed to have “taken hold”, the parties of order, opportunism, parliament, the courts of justice, the armed forces, etc., turned out in full force to rescue their decayed and rotten landlord-bureaucratic state. Counter-revolutionary tasks became the order of the day and the military rushed to the front line, dusting off their counter-subversive warfare manuals.
Since the late 1990s the country’s economy has shown clear signs of collapse. Slight and transitory recoveries have not reversed the trend. The concentration of capital and property in the hands of a few as part of the process of accumulation of capital by the big bourgeoisie has reached levels never seen before in the history of the country, an accumulation that is carried out at the cost of greater exploitation and oppression of the working class and the working masses in the countryside and the city, further exacerbating inequality.
The semi-colonial and semi-feudal Chilean society, in which a particular type of bureaucratic capitalism is developing, is in a deep crisis that is expressed in a concentrated form in the political situation of our country, that is a rampant delegitimisation of the Chilean bureaucratic landlord state and its main institutions. Corruption, price collusion, monopolism, parasitism, decomposition and a dying type of capitalism, are part of the accumulation of capital that on the other side implies the constant fall of the wage share in the GDP, greater concentration of land in few hands to the detriment of the working masses of the countryside, the biggest housing deficit in 25 years, a galloping inflation that steals the bread from the table of the children of the people. Accumulation of capital that plunders broad sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and constrains the middle bourgeoisie, preventing the development of a real national economy.
Just to dig deeper. A defender of bureaucratic capitalism published a column in February this year: “The Keynesian policies of the last few years (i.e. expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to finance deficit public spending and increasing debt) have brought the structural fiscal deficit to 11.5%, public debt to 34.9% of GDP and inflation to 7%, as well as an increase in poverty and destitution. The effects of government bonuses are quickly outweighed by higher living costs, reflected in Chile’s 74% growth in encampments since 2019 (the highest figure since 1996). In this context, the new finance minister inherits a complex scenario.” If we add to this that the concentration of land ownership in Chile is the third highest in Latin America, a continent that globally shows the highest rates of concentration,
All these elements described above, in addition to others, make up a historical accumulation of high explosiveness in the masses that led in October 2019 to a popular rebellion as rarely seen before in the history of the country. This confirms that countries like ours are experiencing a revolutionary situation of unequal development. Those at the top cannot govern as they have done so far and those at the bottom cannot tolerate being governed as they have been governed so far. Thus, we are in the presence of the best conditions for the development of the revolutionary situation, which will probably lead to a new people’s revolt. Where there is oppression there is rebellion, says Chairman Mao.
Faced with this demonstration of the excellent revolutionary health of the popular masses, the reactionary classes, together with their acolytes and lackeys, rushed to sign an “Agreement for Peace and Democracy” on 15 November 2019.
A new social and governance pact: the bureaucratic way forward
In response to the acute situation described above, the new president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, like all demagogues, made great promises and offers in his election campaign. Many of these promises have already been put on hold and shelved for the next campaign. Today the reasons of state, of the old landlord-bureaucratic state, demand moderation, to respect “the rules of the democratic game” and to isolate the usual troublemakers and continue to imprison them. They talk about re-establishing the rule of law, i.e. defending tooth and nail the joint dictatorship of big landowners and big bourgeoisie.
On the other hand, the promise to put an end to “neo-liberalism”, the announcements of reforms and profound changes as well as a new constitution are the mock measures that the Boric government and the Convention are trying to offer the people to calm their anger. What do they ask for in return, forget the class struggle, they ask for conciliation and capitulation, social peace (the peace of the prisons and cemeteries) and the end of revolutionary violence. They also promise that the “transformations” can be carried out gradually through institutional channels, thus recovering their longed-for “social cohesion” and the governability of the country (i.e. a subdued people). Boric maintains in an interview given at the beginning of March this year that “the social contract has been broken. And from my point of view by the elites. And, therefore, in order to recover order, new forms are required and not to repeat the same as in the past”. He then added: “the promise of equality and inclusion has not been fulfilled, and therefore, that social pact is broken and we need to build a new one.” The old ECLAC promise of growth with equity or equality, propagandised by the previous concertacionist governments, is seen as a new failure for the country. Boric, in his eagerness to crush the people’s rebellion, proclaims the fallacious idea of a “collaborative society”, for which “structural reforms” will be required. That is to say, to re-improve bureaucratic capitalism and restructure the old state.
There is no doubt that the ideologues of some of the fractions and groups of the big bourgeoisie (represented today by the Boric government), or even petty bourgeois ideologues will engage in theoretical treatises to square this regime with a sort of first step on a very long and eternal path of pseudo-revolutionary changes. They will write hundreds of mammoth treatises to mask or justify their true class nature, and the very class nature of the Chilean state. Their futile efforts aim to deny the class struggle and replace it with “class conciliation”: rich and poor can coexist in harmony, but for this to work certain rules of the political game have to be modified, things have to be changed so that everything remains the same, and so they dream of establishing a “new social pact” and achieving so-called “social cohesion”. All this is necessary for them at present in order to re-legitimise the old and rotten regime of domination. They cannot hide their cervical fear of the masses.
With the second round of the presidential elections they presented a farce of polarisation: Kast is the candidate of fascism and Boric would represent a broad anti-fascist political spectrum. On the other hand they claimed that Kast would not provide governability, that only Boric could from the government institutionally channel the explosiveness of the popular masses in order to avoid a new rebellion and outburst as was experienced in October 2019.
Elections are an instrument to deceive the people, so that they can decide who will plunder and oppress them every four years in a putrid alternation of governments. Elections are an instrument of domination that imperialism and all reaction use to “normalise” or legalise military regimes or governments that have emerged from coups d’état, but they have never been and never will be an instrument to liberate the people, much less to develop the revolution. Elections are one more counter-revolutionary instrument used by the joint dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and landowners in the service of imperialism, mainly US imperialism and all reaction.
To recapitulate, the different factions of the big bourgeoisie and their representatives talk about governance and governability, about how to guarantee social peace and generate cohesion in the old society in the perspective of building a “new social contract” without altering the old social relations of exploitation. All this is the bureaucratic path, whose protagonists collude and struggle in order to better serve the counter-revolutionary tasks, the core of which is how to defend and maintain the old and rotten state, all of which we will discuss later in this document.
The class nature of the Chilean state, the Armed Forces and opportunism
True, much is expected of universal suffrage, but it can offer no more than an index to measure to some extent the discontent of the masses with regard to the demands of the people on which the electioneers traffic, but elections can never change the class nature of the Chilean state, as a joint dictatorship of landlords and big bourgeoisie. Lenin said that “except for power, all is illusion”.
In days like today when appeals are made to the “common good”, to “happiness” and that “it will be beautiful”, it is more important and fundamental than ever to turn to the classics to clarify fundamental questions such as those related to the doctrine of the state. Precisely today, when there are more than a few political analysts who recognise that Boric and Apruebo Dignidad’s victory is the greatest electoral and political victory of the “left” in the history of the country (even greater than Allende’s), to which we should add the Plebiscite and the Constitutional Convention.
Marx concluded that: “The origin of states gets lost in a myth that one may believe but may not discuss.” (The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850. Karl Marx).
Later Lenin warned that “the question of the state is a most complex and difficult one, perhaps one that more than any other has been confused by bourgeois scholars, writers and philosophers.” (On the State, Lenin, 1919).
The state is organised violence, the organised violence of one class over another, said the classics of Marxism, and this has not changed one millimetre.
However, for a long time now in our country, both in the government and in the opposition (mainly the electioneers) have been trying to make the people believe that the state is an arena or a playing field where political power is disputed between all the contenders through elections (although we all know that if things become ungovernable, they are quickly resolved by military coups). Success and failure in this contest is measured by votes, with the electoral majority and by winning the executive, opportunism has promised that it will be taking the first step to implement “structural changes”, and thus put an end to what they call “neoliberalism” (which again has nothing to do with it). And so, by steadily increasing the electorate until electoral majorities are reached again and again, then, by this parsimonious accumulation of forces and with an “attenuated presidentialism” as revisionism calls it, a new society will be reached. Undoubtedly, the proposal of “attenuated presidentialism” of the revisionists in the Convention is a euphemism, because, in order to face the present sharp class struggle, they will need an increasing centralisation of political power and there is no doubt that the great support for this opportunist government will necessarily have to be the Armed Forces and the Forces of Order, the backbone of the old state.
Opportunism (Frente Amplio, PS, and others), revisionism, i.e. Boric, Tellier et al. (a specific form of opportunism that traffics in Marxism-Leninism), with nuances, pretend to make us believe that it is possible to reconcile interests through a new correlation of electoral forces. And they can even go further and recognise, when it suits them because ambiguity is their means, that society is divided into classes, and that the state is a field of struggle that can be conquered for the benefit of the people. This is the illusion they try to spread. To reaffirm this idea, they are raising the Constitutional Convention and the struggle in the first two years of Boric’s government will focus on the approval of the new constitutional text in the so-called exit plebiscite, on the one hand. But on the other hand, the main thing will be to contain popular discontent and the legitimate armed violence of the Mapuche masses, creating a buffer to cushion the class struggle and give the old state a chance to survive. They want to win two years by calling to take care of the “victories” they have achieved.
That is why it is necessary to be very emphatic in pointing out that the Chilean state, like any state, is the product and manifestation of the irreconcilable character of class contradictions. It is the organised violence exercised by some classes over others. It is not possible under present conditions to reconcile the classes. The Chilean state represents the interests of the big bourgeoisie and the big landowners, mainly in the service of US imperialism.
That is also why it must be persistently denounced that the illusion with which opportunism and revisionism are peddling is that after successive “progressive” governments the class nature of the old state will be changed. Even revisionism dupes its rank and file with a “military policy”, with its “acquisitions” of the past and that in an uncertain future after a prolonged parsimonious accumulation of forces (i.e., sunk in the mire of parliamentary cretinism) the insurrection will suddenly come and they will triumph. This is the social-corporatist strategy which will probably not even be able to develop state monopoly capital, as the revisionists long for. It will, in turn, be the justification for demanding that the people’s movement does not make “olitas” to the governments of opportunism and if necessary (as it surely will be) to repress the “excesses” of the people, and to try to crush the development of violent protest by the masses.
In this sense, something that does not change one millimetre is the tutelage that the armed forces ultimately exercise over the rest of the bureaucracy of the landlord-bureaucratic state. As the backbone of the old and rotten state, the armed forces today exercise strong control in the shadows, constituting in perspective the real government of salvation of the reactionary classes when their interests are threatened by the militant struggle of the people. From this point of view, the Armed Forces are the pillar on which the interests of the big bourgeoisie and landowners rest, interests at the service of imperialism, mainly US imperialism. This work as a pillar of the joint dictatorship of the ruling classes is not opposed to their corporate or rather closed and self-referential group behaviour, which is useful in the end to fulfil their role as mastiffs of big capital and the big landowners, as can be seen from the bloody pages of their opprobrious history.
The armed forces will sooner or later stage a coup d’état, whether under a civilian or military masquerade, both in the sense of their corporate interests as well as in the field of defending the interests of imperialism and its lackeys. In the corporate sense because they do not want their trade union interests (if one can put it that way) to be affected. They are worried that future “left” governments will affect their financial stability, or their status, or that other types of guards will be created to counterbalance them. On the latter, some champions of order in the context of the constitutional debate on defence are speaking out.
As for the defence of the interests of US imperialism and its lackeys, the Chilean armed forces have amply demonstrated their staunch defence of these interests. Its military commanders have been trained in the Yankee military schools. Even men like Luksic (“powerful man”, a prominent member of the big bourgeoisie) have financed postgraduate studies of Chilean officers in the USA, indeed, he himself has participated in military training given by the army, becoming a reserve officer in the same.
We reiterate, at the risk of being a bore: the Chilean state is not an organ of class conciliation, it is a joint dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and big landowners in the service of imperialism and against the revolutionary classes, against the people and their legitimate organisations and struggles. The people can only fully conquer political power by demolishing this old state and its backbone through people’s war.
Fascism and corporativism
There is no doubt that today Boric is useful to contain the revolution. He has emerged thanks to demolitionism and has also known how to ride on the back of student and popular struggles, as well as being there at the right moments when his presence was required, such as at the signing of the Peace Accord in 2019. But the fundamental problems he faces will have to be solved at the head of the counterrevolution either with a greater reactionarisation of bourgeois democracy or with fascist forms, what is certain is that he presents and presented fascist positions: as “Autonomous” he went against the political parties, the parliament and the demoliberal order, then he uses them to climb, and today with false humility he presents himself as the “leader” of the “process”. It is important to clarify that fascism is the negation of bourgeois liberties, it is not only the terror of the big bourgeoisie and the big landowners, or the stereotypical positions of the brown shirts before the end of the imperialist World War II. Of course neither is it the caricature of Kast, reactionary as he is.
It is good to insist that demo-bourgeois forms and demoliberal ideologies at a certain moment of sharpening class struggle are insufficient to contain the revolution, hence the need for fascism. That is why another key aspect is that of corporatisation. The so-called “social movements” (in their different expressions) which are part of or are on the tail of the present government and the Convention, need to be corporatised in order to gain time and get the exit plebiscite approved, with this they seek to stifle the masses under a top-down command, all this disguised as “full participation” or “direct democracy”, impossible obsurdities, because a real popular democracy will not emerge until the old state is demolished. But they are racing against the clock. Despite the propaganda of the new government and its supporters the mass struggle, popular protest will continue to develop as the living conditions of the masses worsen as a consequence of the system itself, which is living in a general crisis and is already beginning to show clear signs of collapse. Undoubtedly, nothing will fall without a blow.
The restructuring of the old state, part of which is being carried out in the Constitutional Convention, is intended to become the only legitimate channel for the “outbreak”, i.e. corporatisation, although it is far from being completed. They ride over the masses, just as the Boric government has been doing, only this time the student movement has taken up the path of struggle again, despite the declarations of a handful of corporatised little leaders in La Moneda.
Together with the Convention, this government will be presented with the historical dilemma of setting up a corporative structure (a question not concluded by Ibáñez in the 1920s, by Grove and Dávila in the 1930s and by Allende and Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s) under the false pretext of combating the economic groups (“economic right”), the richest and most privileged. It is a corporate social reordering under a fascist policy, but still preserving demoliberal appearances.
We conclude this part with a forceful quote from Chairman Gonzalo: “Questioning parliament is a basic position of fascism that aims against the traditional bourgeois-democratic state structure, based on the denial of the principles, freedoms and rights established in the 18th century, which postulates corporate organisation and maximises reactionary violence, all in the name of the most unbridled class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie…”. “Historically, fascism has developed most at critical moments for the old state, mainly when revolution threatens to overthrow the outdated dominant order but post-World War II fascism cannot, to this day, openly unfold as such, let alone coalesce corporatisation, despite its many attempts and ‘theorisations’: ‘democratic corporatism’, ‘full participation democracy’, ‘social democracy’, etc.” (1991)
The three counter-revolutionary tasks
Three are the most important counter-revolutionary tasks which the various sectors of reaction, in collusion and struggle, have been carrying out for years: to boost bureaucratic capitalism, to restructure the state and to prevent the revolution. These tasks are applied mainly in the service of US imperialism. These three tasks are inseparably linked.
1. Re-launching bureaucratic capitalism
In 2021, the World Bank published a report on Chile (“Pieces for Development: Policy Briefs for Chile”), which states: “Low productivity growth, fuelled by a lack of continued progress on structural reforms and the end of the commodity boom, led to a slowdown in growth that averaged only 2% in the six years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic”. It then adds, “Progress on equity also stalled, affecting not only productivity growth but also social cohesion.” “This left a large section of society disconnected from development and explain some of the demands of the 2019 social outburst.”
This body mandated by US imperialism is evidence of the needs of the US for its semi-colonies to contribute more capital to overcome the crisis in which it finds itself. The “structural reforms” point in the same direction as this government, which has more legitimacy than that of Piñera. The problem of productivity has to do with how to exploit the proletariat and the people more. For the World Bank, all this requires maintaining macroeconomic balances, stimulating growth and productivity.
On the other hand, the autonomy of the central bank will be left unchanged. FA, PS, INN lined up for that. The central bank since 1925 has been a tool that has increasingly served to deepen our semi-colonial condition.
Boric, Tellier, Vallejo and co., PS and FA, opportunists and revisionists federate to reinstate a group of the bureaucratic fraction of the big bourgeoisie. They themselves, careerists, are on the way to becoming a bureaucratic fraction of the big bourgeoisie, what some petty-bourgeois historians call “state entrepreneurship”. They defend the interests of state monopoly capital (it is not state capitalism). These same interests are expressed in sections of the Convention that call for the nationalisation of mining or other resources. This will not eliminate bureaucratic capitalism, but rather try to revive it and pull it out of the deep general crisis in which it finds itself, as the World Bank itself notes. This bureaucratic bourgeoisie seeks to regain the economic ground on which it retreated in 1973. Engels already said in the 19th century that the nationalisation of private capital enterprises is not socialism. Monopoly capital, whether state or private, does not lose its class nature, and is a social relation of exploitation of the revolutionary classes, of the people.
On this very point Chairman Gonzalo pointed out “…it is not enough for a regime to attack the oligarchy or to propose to reclaim natural wealth or to talk of handing over the land to those who work it for it to be considered revolutionary; it could be, as when Leguía was in power today, a renewal of the intermediary bourgeoisie and the development of bureaucratic capitalism”. (PG, La problemática nacional, 1974)
2. State restructuring
The Chilean state is restructured to cushion the clashes between the classes. The central problem for the reactionary classes, as we said above, is how to defend and maintain the old state. The Chilean state, this power apparently situated above society and called upon to buffer conflict and keep it within the limits of ‘order’, urgently needs to be readjusted, restructured, so that the warring classes in the old society do not devour themselves.
Where the state structured according to the particular situation of the class struggle at a given moment weakens or some of its functions break down, the risk arises that antagonisms will overflow the politically constructed channels to contain them. That is the moment when the restructuring of the state becomes necessary.
The Boric government has been making announcements of all kinds, but all of them have as their main task to pacify the country. They will seek to apply a set of measures to stifle the class struggle, to corrupt the most militant sectors of the masses with false promises of change or to subdue them with jail, repression and death. The future interior minister has been making a persistent call to pacify the centre of the capital. She seeks to create public opinion in order to strike harder at popular protest and delegitimise it, serving counter-revolutionary plans. The manager of this rotten old state, Gabriel Boric Font, in his new tone of despotic voice, warns that the rule of law must be respected in the IX and VIII region. The chosen cabinet is tailor-made for Yankee imperialism. The finance minister is an arch-approved US vassal.
They claim that the Constitutional Convention is the continuation of the “social explosion”. At every moment in the media, not a few convention members are accusing their participation in the “explosion”, and that the struggle and political disputes in the Convention is the heir of the violent street struggle of the masses in 2019.
There are clear counterrevolutionary tasks that Boric must carry out as a good servant of imperialism and the various factions of the big bourgeoisie. Secretly, as an expression of his sibylline style, he has made agreements with US imperialism, taking sides with them in the war of aggression of Russian imperialism on the Ukrainian people.
The revisionists of the Tellier/Carmona/Vallejo clique have previously participated in the concertationist management, they have long experience of dealing with the interests of the people. In the counter-revolutionary task of readjusting the state, as hardened opportunists, they seek not only to “surround” the Convention with mobilisations, but rather to corporativise the mass movement.
The alleged deepening of democracy, the participation of the “social movement” in the new management is part of the readjustments to corporatise the masses. This restructuring of the state is a counter-revolutionary task, because they need to contain, divert or “institutionalise” the class struggle, corporatisation is an old dream of a sector of the big bourgeoisie and its representatives, it is a way of striking at the growing popular protest in the countryside and in the city, especially the armed struggle of the poor Mapuche peasantry. But this false democratisation has nothing to do with the real solution to the fundamental problems of our country, such as the land problem, semi-feudalism, imperialist domination and bureaucratic capitalism, problems that will only be solved by a new democratic revolution through people’s war.
Conjuring the revolution
Boric said of the Mapuche struggle that “it is an issue in which we have to take responsibility, a conflict between the Chilean state and the Mapuche nation”, adding that “we have decided on a path, which is the path of dialogue, and this dialogue will annoy those who believe that through violence or confrontation, things can be achieved”. He said that “it is a historical and political conflict”, not just one of public order. Recently, the undersecretary of the interior Manuel Monsalve (Socialist Party) referred to the Mapuche struggle and indicated that Boric’s mandate is to “recover dialogue, recover the presence of the state, and assume that here we have a highly complex political conflict”, adding that “we believe that what is happening in the Constitutional Convention is very coherent, where it is being written that our country is plurinational, that the political rights of the native peoples are being written”. In another intervention, he maintained that “we do not want to impose, but I think we have also been clear”…. “We will use the tool of dialogue, we are not partisan, we do not share impositions, we do not share threats and we do not share violence”. Days later, after analysing the facts of rural violence and statements by Mapuche resistance organisations, he brought together a “Police Committee” (a meeting with the General Director of Carabineros, the National Director of Order and Security, the Director of Intelligence, and from the PDI the Deputy Director of Intelligence, Organised Crime and Migratory Security and the Deputy Director of Police and Criminal Investigation) Monsalve concluded by saying: “we are going to talk and dialogue with all those who are available to achieve the peace and tranquillity that the entire national territory deserves”, “under threat and under acts of violence there is no possibility of dialogue or agreement with the government” “those who take the path of violence, tell them that there is another way, that it seems to us that the path of dialogue is the way to confront the structural problem that exists in the Araucanía Region and in the south of Chile” in addition to announcing that they will combat poverty and territorial inequality, In other words, a counter-insurgency strategy to try to win hearts and souls by riding on the needs of the masses of the poor Mapuche peasantry, in order to continue the repressive measures in stages, and although he announced that he would not extend the state of emergency, the militarisation of the area has been a matter that has been denounced for years.
“Low-intensity warfare proposes: linking the military to the political; linking military action to social and economic reforms; developing military action complemented by intelligence, psychological operations, civic action and control of the population and resources; and legitimisation, which demands respect for human rights”. Respect for human rights is merely a declaration of good intentions.
The measures that have been taken against the just and correct armed struggle of the Mapuche people are those that will be taken as soon as the struggle develops in the rest of the country, both in the countryside and in the cities.
When it is proposed to prevent the revolution, it is to prevent the risks of the revolution, it is to prevent it from rising to a higher form of struggle, that is to say that it will develop through people’s war, it is the continuation of the class struggle but by military means. However, there can be neither people’s war nor its victory without an authentic Communist Party, without a people’s guerrilla army, without a revolutionary front, three fundamental instruments to carry victory to the end. Today the communists of Chile, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, need to reconstitute the Party that Recabarren founded 100 years ago. Only with a reconstituted general staff can the proletariat and the people triumph. That is why conjuring up the revolution as well as “pacifying” the country requires the reactionary classes to conjure up the reconstitution of the Communist Party, as a militarised Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party. In perspective, the counter-revolutionary tasks are aimed at preventing the Chilean revolution from integrating the scientific ideology of the proletariat, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, and the universally valid contributions of Chairman Gonzalo. But it is inevitable that the movement of the deep and profound masses, that the violent popular protest will develop in the direction of merging with the communist movement pushing for reconstitution. Tactically it is a problem of time plus time minus, but strategically it is a historical and political necessity.
That is why the old state, through its new government, relies and will rely even more on “low-intensity warfare”, on conquering hearts and souls, on declaring the alleged failure of socialism and the expiry of Marxism, or trafficking in pseudo-Marxism to continue the exploitation and oppression of the people, i.e. rotten revisionism like that of the Tellier-Carmona clique.
They are trying to pass off a new government and the Constitutional Convention as a “revolution” (pure illusions), in order to conjure up the inevitable real national-democratic revolution that the people need and demand. That is why the restructuring of the old state, without being able to eliminate or sweep away with a new constitution or a new government the character of a joint dictatorship of big landowners and big bourgeoisie, at the service of imperialism, will sooner or later have to develop under a more reactionary bourgeois democracy or under a fascist regime that will carry forward the corporatisation of the popular movement. Boric is debating between these two reactionary exits and his government is already showing evidence of fascist and corporatist positions that are taking shape in the text of the new constitution.
The road of the people: democratic revolution
They have failed to pacify the masses with false promises of reforms whose costs we know will ultimately fall brutally on the class and the people. For more than a decade, popular protest throughout the country has shown a sustained rise in its most violent expressions. Within this historical and political trend there are ebbs and flows, a high point in the tide being the rebellion of October 2019. This revolutionary mass uprising had in the Mapuche flags a symbol of rebellion. This identity has to do with the revolutionary violence that the masses of poor Mapuche peasants have been deploying, an armed rebellion that is mainly against large landowners (among them the large forestry estates).
The riot is the embryo of political consciousness, the explosion of October 18, its fundamentally violent character, contains key questions about mass revolutionary violence. The continuation of the October rebellion, in strategic and military perspective, is the armed insurrection in the main cities as an integral part of the people’s war, where the countryside is the main thing and the city a complement. The armed struggle of the poor Mapuche peasantry (mainly the Mapuche) preceded the uprising of 2019, and was precisely a symbol of the rebellion. The October rebellion is in synthesis part of the class struggle for the conquest of power by the class and the people. Without a revolutionary general staff, without a militarised Communist Party, this will never be achieved.
As Recabarren said, we can expect nothing from parliament, nothing from elections, nothing from the courts of justice and much less from the governments (civil or military) created under the old society. The proletariat and the people can expect nothing from their oppressors but chains. Today, the elections, the demorepresentative institutions serve to beautify the old and rotten landlord-bureaucratic state. On the other hand, the proletariat has itself to emancipate itself, and in doing so it will emancipate the whole of humanity. But it needs its General Staff, its Party, its militarised Communist Party, a party based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism.
The expectations and the avalanche of illusions provoked by electoral demagogy will sooner or later end up crushing opportunism itself, leaving firmly in place the people’s hope for a tomorrow without rich and poor, without exploited and exploiters, great advances that can only come about by the hand of people’s war, the only possible way to carry the victory of the new democratic revolution to the end, to advance uninterruptedly to socialism and through cultural revolutions to golden communism.
There exists in the country a powerful reality, that reality is the masses, with a great history, ignored, but every time they stand up the earth trembles, reaction cackles in terror, only with blood have they appeased their fury, and the opportunist lackeys seek to divert and hinder the march of the masses. Peasant masses, workers’ masses. Increasingly, more and more sections of the masses are realising the necessity of violence, of its organisation and elevation to higher forms of its deployment. This is in perfect harmony with the fact that revolution is a historical and political trend in the country and in the world. These are times of war.
We said that “participation” and “social movements” have been a key issue for corporatisation in the current political situation. But popular protest will not stop, despite the opportunist government’s attempts to divert, appease and contain it. Our task is to unite with the depths and depths of the basic masses, the poor masses, to mobilise them and develop popular protest.
The path of the people is to fight against this corporatisation, to defend their gains and to achieve others. Moving towards the beginning of the people’s war, the only way to destroy their main enemies and achieve the victory of the democratic revolution.
A genuine revolution demands the demolition of the old state, the confiscation of the big property of the big bourgeoisie and big landowners, the expulsion of imperialism and the confiscation of its assets, which are the basic questions for the implementation of the programme of new democracy. For this, the targets of the revolution must be very clear: mainly US imperialism, semi-feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism.
April 2022
Red Faction of the Communist Party of Chile
