Reformism Has Never Made Revolutions
Leaflet distributed in the streets during the commemoration of a new September 11. With our memory alive until we conquer our future. Those who make half-hearted revolutions dig their own grave.

When the exploited decide to entrust the destiny of their lives in their own hands, all those sectors whose existence depends on exploitation unite against them, applying various strategies to contain and defeat them. Thus, from right to left, all the parties that defend the fundamental categories of capitalist civilization are committed.

In the 60’s and 70’s an immense international revolutionary wave was taking place, and in Chile a process that captured the attention of the whole world was taking shape. This process was not limited to the vicissitudes of the reformist alliance of the Popular Unity, with Allende at its head. On the contrary, it was emerging from a growing social movement that expressed itself heterogeneously in factory occupations, land and farm seizures, soup kitchens, cultural associations, and a wide range of community and anti-capitalist experiences. As happens in these cases, this movement came up against limitations that arose and grew from its own internal dynamics, as well as against the continuous and fierce state repression (several massacres were recorded in a few years, such as the Pampa Irigoin massacre in Puerto Montt in 1969, under the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva, when 11 settlers were murdered, including a 3-month-old infant) and the reformist framework.

Supported by these struggles, the UP managed to reach the government in 1970, to apply a social democratic program while openly fighting those who broke from below the framework of bourgeois legality and dared to act autonomously.

For three years the autonomous activity of workers, peasants and settlers, which bore fruit with the formation of the industrial cordons, the expropriation of estates at a rate that the UP could not — despite its efforts — control, or the communal commands and the supply and price boards (JAP), became increasingly intolerable for the capitalist class.

The bloody military coup occurred then as a last measure to protect the ruling class, framed in the counterrevolutionary response that throughout the globe was restructuring Capital in crisis. But its success in defeating the proletariat cannot be explained without the constant reactionary work of the left itself, which disorganizes, represses and literally disarms it.

“Forty-five days before the coup Allende considered that the main problems of the country were the excessive wage demands of the workers, their ‘economism’, and the ‘union parallelism’ of the industrial strands. He pronounced a severe sermon against the working class and clarified categorically: ‘THIS COUNTRY IS LIVING A CAPITALIST PROCESS’; he announced a severe wage policy warning that in the coming year wage readjustments could be lower than the rise in the cost of living, he clarified that the Armed Forces would continue to strictly apply the arms control law and he suggested, amidst an ovation from his ‘communist’ hosts that the MIR[1] could be acting in complicity with the CIA. As we can see, an excellent policy to prepare the proletariat for the confrontations to come”[2].

It becomes inescapable to ponder then the demobilizing role of the left of capital, which moves within the bourgeois political framework and which proposes nothing other than the rearrangement of mercantile logics, thus taking stock of its role in the 70s and the one it has played since the revolt of 2019, mainly through the parties today in government (P “C” and FA), but also of those groups that give it their “critical support”, seconding them in their maneuvers with the “naive” pretension of “overflowing” them. In this way, from the “Pact for Peace and the New Constitution” signed by almost all political parties with parliamentary representation on November 15, 2019, the whole party of order has been dedicated to dilute the power of the imposing movement developed since the historic days of October 18–19. Its explicit objective was to save the institutionality, government and congress mainly, through successive electoral events that hijacked the self-activity of the working class, sabotaging the nascent Territorial Assemblies, and empowering the ‘proper common sense’ of this society organized around exploitation and social domination and, therefore, of state fetishism. This is the declared objective of the constituent process. Its role was certainly effective: the electoral campaigns, first for the plebiscite of entry, and then for the election of constituents and others (among which the presidential election of 2021 stands out) served the purpose of relatively clearing the streets, taking away strength from various expressions of self-organization and struggles for demands, besides granting impunity to those responsible for state terrorism and reaffirming the political imprisonment of dozens of prisoners of the revolt. But for the illusions of a broad sector that saw in the drafting of a new constitution a way to access social rights, this path resulted in a resounding failure, consummated last September 4.

The proletariat is not mobilized by ideological slogans or promises presented to it as alien, but by its concrete needs, which does not mean that it cannot act consciously. The reduction and codification of proletarian vindictive struggles into categories proper to the niches of the academic market have no other effect than to fragment the struggles, isolate them and finally disconnect them from their original meaning, imposing them later as something external and sowing disappointment and impotence. This is one of the factors behind the overwhelming electoral defeat of “approvalism”. In addition to a lousy campaign, the reactionary political groups knew how to take better advantage of themes such as national unity, security and order, which are “proper” to their “sphere”. Themes that the left of capital never seeks to deal with in depth, but which, twinned with their right-wing rivals, they also use in a proselytizing way. Patriotic slogans, responses to the lies and “terror campaigns” of the right wing that do everything possible to dissociate themselves from any real threat to power and its lackeys, centrality of the family and other rancid values, including sexism, racism and homophobia, are very common elements to observe in supposedly critical sectors, which reached paroxysm after the recent triumph of the “rejection”, in which a real wave of contempt towards the “populace” was observed by those who pretended to fight on its behalf.

Both the processes of the 1970s and those of 2019 onwards, interrupt their extension and deepening when they do not direct their critiques and struggles against the core of capitalist relations (labor, money, value) and the State as such. The obvious lessons about the role of the reformist sectors, which are not just a moderate version within the struggles against capital, but possess radically different objectives (preservation of the capitalist social order versus its radical negation and overcoming), should not be swept under the carpet to be paraded back to the slaughterhouse.

Our path is not integration into current politics but its destruction. This is a necessity that arises from the same experiences. To keep banging our heads against the institutional wall, asking again and again for a “true and democratic” constituent assembly and a new constitution, instead of creating and empowering our own spaces, strengthening the bonds and fraternal discussions between individuals and collectivities, and shaping solidarity relations that respond to our most pressing and immediate needs, cannot be the path to follow.

[1] Urban guerrilla organization Revolutionary Left Movement

[2] Helios Prieto (1973) Chile: the guerrillas were among us. It can be downloaded along with other related materials from here (Spanish-language): http://el-radical-libre.blogspot.com/2019/09/la-dictadura-del-capital-es-permanente.html