OF THE JUNTA id awareness of the thorny political problems that ere posed for his party and the revolutionary left, aced on the one hand with brutal repression and he extermination of so many cadres and militants ind on the other hand with the pressures exerted y the reformists of the SP and the CP, who have earned nothing from the tragic experience of Sepember 11. The name of Miguel Enriquez is inscribed in the oll of martyrs of the Latin American and world revolution. His sacrifice will be an example for the new generations who will continue his fight, the fight of Che Guevara and all the martyrs of CHILE UNDLABLE SI We are publishing below an interview granted to Jean-Pierre Beauvais by one of the members in Chile of the Liga Comunista (Communist League). It deals with the present situation in Chile and the activities of the LC. The Liga Comunista is a revolutionary-Marxist organization that maintains fraternal relations with the Fourth International. It was formed shortly before the 1973 coup and held its first congress several months ago, in Chile. Question. More than a year has gone by since the overthrow of the Unidad Popular government. On September 11, as the junta was "celebrating" its first anniversary, Pinochet gave a speech designed for foreign consumption in which he spoke of "liberal" measures. Is there any indication that such measures are going to be taken? Answer. None. The statements made by Pinochet after a year of bloody dictatorship are nothing but a sinister farce. At the time of his speech, not a single political prisoner had been let out of the many concentration camps in which they had been held for a year. Furthermore, the abolition of the "state of internal war" and its replacement by the "state of siege for internal defense" means nothing but the maintenance of the existing situation. The military has exactly the same powers and prerogatives.
the workers movement, from Mexico to Argentina, from Bolivia to Guatemala. The Fourth International shares the grief of the militants of the MIR and pledges itself to continue the fight against the murderers of Enriquez and their allies and patrons throughout the world. MILITANT SOLIDARITY WITH THE MIR! LONG LIVE THE LATIN AMERICAN SOCIALIST REVOLUTION! October 8, 1974 The curfew is maintained. Not that a curfew is necessary for keeping the repression going full blast; but its purpose is to maintain a latent state of collective terror. The shots fired for no reason every night and the military trucks' squealing to a halt in front of this or that house in the poblaciones (shantytowns), where only military trucks are allowed to travel, serve the same ends. In fact, what is going on now is a new wave of massive searches. Almost every night the military surrounds a población and arrests a thousand or two thousand persons. Very often "stop and frisks" are carried out in the movie theaters. Streets are often blocked off to run identity checks on everybody in the block. Concurrently, a more selective repression against the left is going on. Every day, for a growing number of militants, there is torture and death. Judges still refuse to grant habeus corpus when someone disappears into the hands of the executioners of the military intelligence services. Trade-union, political, and democratic rights continue to be totally denied. Basically, nothing has changed, and there is no sign pointing to any sort of evolution in the methods of the dictatorship or the aims of those who compose it. Q. Why can't the dictatorship make the slightest concession or overture to all the internal and ex-
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CHILE ternal pressures? Or why doesn't it want to? A. Because any breach, however small, in the present rule by terror would immediately be seized on by the masses to implement a very rapid process of reorganization and development of struggles. The dictatorship is deeply aware of this. The Chilean proletariat and popular masses have a great tradition of struggle and combativity. The defeat of Septem-o ber 11, 1973, and the savage repression that followed have not wiped this out. The dictatorship does not possess the political stability necessary to deal with the situation through any means not based on massive and bloody terror. The reason is that the dictatorship today has lost a big part of the social base it had just after the coup. Its economic policy has directly affected not only the popular masses but also the petty bourgeoisie and even certain layers of the bourgeoisie. The considerable decline in the buying power of a good part of the population, the successive devaluations of the escudo and the consequent increase in the price of imported goods, the rise in interest rates, and so on have bankrupted a large number of merchants and small and middle-sized industries. Public employees and white-collar and supervisory workers in the private sector have been fired by the thousands, and the wages of those who can still work are ridiculous. The growing malaise among these social sectors is expressed politically in the break in relations between the dictatorship on the one hand and the most reactionary sections of the Christian Democracy (like Frei and Alwyn) and other bourgeois political groupings on the other. This has considerably reduced the dictatorship's maneuvering room. It is only by continuing its policy of massacre, blind torture, and crushing of any sign of opposition that the junta can hope to attain the objectives it has set itself. Q. What are those objectives? And what are the chances that they will be attained? A. The dictatorship wants to consolidate the system of capitalist exploitation in Chile on a new basis. On the political level, it wants to "depoliticize" the "democratic" bourgeois state with a corporatist structure. On the economic level it is trying to develop a process similar to the one developed by the Brazilian military since the coup against Goulart in 1964. The Chilean military's identification with their Brazilian counterparts is total. The people 8 now in charge of economic policy never miss an opportunity to point this out. Their plan clearly corresponds in the first place to the interests of
North American big capital but also to those of European capital and the sectors of the Chilean bourgeoisie that are intimately linked to Europe and the United States. By driving down the buying power of the masses, creating an enormous reserve army of unemployed (700, 000 are now unemployed, that is, 20 percent of the active population), and thereby creating a crisis of unprecedented gravity among those sectors of the small, middle-sized, and even big bourgeoisie whose interests are tied to the internal market, the dictatorship wants to create a dynamic pole of capitalist development through building a durable consumer goods industry essentially oriented toward the export market.
This plan will fail completely. The characteristics of the Chilean economy and the way it has been linked historically to the world capitalist market deprive Chile of all the specific conditions that made the so-called Brazilian miracle possible. Moreover, conjunctural factors work against fulfillment of such a plan. The world capitalist system has entered a period of acute crisis, the effects of which are more visible every day in the imperialist metropolises. In the framework of increased competition, they have more and more difficulty selling their products in already saturated markets. Transitory solutions of the Brazilian type are not possible now. Brazil itself is beginning to enter into crisis. It now appears impossible for it to maintain the economic growth rate in coming years as high as it has been during the past six years. The assumption that Chilean industry can make gains on the already saturated regional markets of Latin America is totally utopian. The dictatorship considers the countries of the Andes Pact to be the privileged terrain for a breakthrough by Chilean industry. But the facilities that have been granted to big imperialist capital are incompatible with the terms of this pact and have created a crisis between Chile and the other member countries. The greater and greater difficulties the dictatorship is experiencing in carrying out its economic objectives are reflected in the absence of any significant foreign investment in spite of the advantages that have been offered. Essentially, what has been obtained is credit for buying weapons. And the immediately political character of such credits is obvious. Thus, all the pillars on which the dictatorship thought it could base its delirious project of "Chile, gran nación" (Chile, great nation) have collapsed.
The only thing to be expected from the dictatorship's maintenance in power is progressive degradation of the situation of the Chilean popular masses and even of considerable sectors of the owning classes themselves. Q. Presented in this way, the situation appears rich in possibilities. A. The political and social contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and even within the bourgeoisie itself are considerable. Nevertheless, for the moment they do not challenge the stability of the junta. There is a chasm between the degree of "latent opposition" to the dictatorship among the Chilean masses and their ability to organize and mobilize. Even the opposition bourgeois sectors are not now in position to structure a strong and credible movement. This is one of the consequences of the form taken by the defeat of the working class and the popular masses on September 11, 1973. The vacillations of centrism and the open and cynical betrayal of reformism permitted the forces of the military dictatorship to carry off a crushing victory. It was an extremely tough coup. Confronted with it, the working class, which had no real leadership, was not even able to organize the beginning of an orderly retreat leading to a defensive reaction. With an unheard-of rapidity and brutality things went from a situation eminently favorable for definitively destroying the system of bourgeois rule to a situation in which the worker and popular masses found themselves totally disorganized and unable to deal with reactionary violence of a bestiality unprecedented in Latin America. No important organization of the workers movement was still in position to act after the coup. Thus, after a heroic but very brief resistance, the dictatorship was able to do whatever it wanted to do to attain. its goals. In reality; the great majority of people, of militants, who were assassinated did not fall in combat but were defense less victims torn from their work places during the day and from their homes after the curfew. That is why in the months following the coup combativity was very weak, if not nil, and the demoralization was very deep. This demoralization especially affected many militants, who began to leave the country. The parties of the traditional left, and to a lesser extent the revolutionary organizations, notably the MIR, were hard hit, although in most cases the dictatorship did not achieve its declared objective, which was to destroy them totally. Under these conditions, a collapse of the military regime in the short run is totally excluded. There is absolutely no point in sowing illusions on this score. The road to be traveled toward overthrowing the regime will be long and difficult. You have to start from that. Q. What is the perspective of the Liga Comunista in this situation? A. Any discussion of the tasks to be accomplished today must begin with an analysis of the defeat, of its character and extent. There is nothing to be gained by trying to hide the extent of the defeat or by mystifying the real state of the resistance and the forces that revolutionaries now command. On the contrary, that would lead to serious errors that would retard the process of recovery of the workers and popular movement even more. The problem of reorganizing the workers and popular movement -- or more exactly, taking the first steps toward this reorganization -- must start from that realization, and from a number of other factors: the long tradition of struggle and combativity of the exploited masses of Chile, the growing rejection of the dictatorship among very numerous social sectors, the essential failure of the political and economic projects of the military. But it is not easy to concretize this in practice. In the present situation any demonstration of combativity or opposition to the policy of the junta, no matter how modest, is met with the most savage and violent repression. Further, since the exploited masses today have no ability to respond to the brutal repression of the military, we must be especially cautious as to the specific forms of struggle that we propose or push for. All the more so in that the junta is not especially concerned with the effects its criminal practices may have. When any manifestation of resistance occurs, even the most modest, the repression comes down quickly and brutally on the place of the conflict, whether it be a factory, a población, or whatever. In the face of that, the masses are completely isolated and have no way to extend the struggle beyond the place where it starts, or even to make it known. The atomization on the one hand and the repressive apparatus on the other are such that it is nearly impossible to establish links with other factories, other industries, other poblaciones. Also, there is no significant means of propaganda (press, etc.) that could be used to support a struggle or to publicize it and thereby denounce the repression and organize solidarity. If. to this we add the enormous unemployment we mentioned before, we can see that the conditions
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CHILE under which the first workers and popular struggles must go on are extremely difficult. Although formally the social laws on working conditions have not been abolished, in reality they are no longer respected by the employers, who do whatever they want. We have seen many cases in which an employer, faced with a modest demand for wage increases, simply fires all the workers and hires new ones the next day, drawn from the reserve army of 700,000 unemployed; in fact, he even hires them at even lower wages. When one worker is fired, hundreds are prepared to take his place under any conditions at all. Just to survive. Let us take just one example to illustrate the difficulties the workers meet in mobilizing even for very modest objectives. The most obvious and even easiest form of struggle when the workers want to win something is the strike. And there have been some (especially during the months immediately following the coup). They were isolated and spontaneous strikes. Not a single one had a positive result. Immediately informed of a movement, the military would arrive at the work place to repress it. In some cases those workers identified by informers as being responsible for the strike were arrested and they often disappeared. In other cases a group would be selected at random and shot on the spot as an example. Conclusion: Not only were the demands not won, the increase in terror was such that the refusal to organize and hesitance about any proposal to struggle became even stronger than before. Q. Is there any way out of such a situation? A. We believe that the proposals for struggle that the most advanced sectors of the revolution must 10 make to the masses have to have a concrete possibility of success. In the present situation failure means demoralization and more steps backward. This does not mean that we propose a struggle only when we are 100 percent sure of success. For one thing such guarantees are impossible, and for another, that would lead us to a completely passive if not conservative attitude. But it does mean that we must work with the perspective of very modest and partial victories through which the workers can again develop confidence in themselves and in their own strength. It is only through such a process that conditions can be created allowing greater forces of struggle and organization to develop. How can we move in this direction? There is a limit beyond which the dictatorship cannot go, in the criminal and bloody manner it is accustomed to, without calculating whether what it loses politically can be gained back by bringing the repressive potential into play. That is the source of the (very narrow) room for maneuver that the masses must use to concretize their initial forms of struggle. For example, in the case of wage demands, the only examples of successful struggle are those in which the workers succeeded in organizing systematic but scarcely visible sabotage of the rhythms of production. The multiplication of "mistakes, " creation of bottlenecks in the productive process, slowdowns, waste of raw materials and energy, and a thousand other forms of obstruction that the workers can devise led to a reduction in productivity and production, thus increasing the costs and reducing the profits for the capitalists. Confronted with such a situation, the employers may think about the possibility of increasing wages or satisfying other demands put forward or made known in a clandestine manner, through leaflets left in the factory toilets, for example.
n some cases in which employers have been faced vith such a form of resistance they have called on he armed forces; but when they arrived everything ras functioning "normally" in the factory. In those ases, the intervention of the soldiers did not go eyond a violent threatening speech delivered by he officer in charge of reestablishing order. ut it must be clear and no illusions should be deeloped. While it is possible under some sharply letermined conditions to avoid direct repression gainst the workers as a whole, that does not preent the dictatorship from working intensely, and y all possible means, to root out "ringleaders. " lence the necessity for absolute clandestinity even n the level of such modest activity. 2. Have these tactics produced success in some pecific sectors? 4. Yes, in some industries requiring highly skilled vorkers. The chances of success are directly related o the workers' indispensability. In places where it akes the employers two years to train a worker and get the most out of him, the possibilities are much greater than in places where workers can be replaced rom one day to the next. In those cases, the posibilities in the present context are virtually nil. The place the factory occupies in the national econmy is also an element in determining possibilities or success. The dictatorship cannot afford paralysis in the copper mines, for example, because copper exports are the main source of currency income. t is on the basis of such criteria that we are organizing our intervention, modest though it may be, even though it is particularly difficult to penetrate such sectors. Q. Can you give us other examples of struggle? A. In some poblaciones soup kitchens have been organized to feed the unemployed; the supplies are given by those who are working. At first glance, such actions could appear as purely humanitarian gestures. In reality, however, they have a clear meaning of opposition to the dictatorship's policy, and they are seen as such by all. the pobladores. Proposing an objective of this type first of all assures breadth to the movement, because the masses can participate and collaborate without running great risks of being imprisoned or murdered. But to make a soup kitchen function on a daily basis a more or less stable organization is needed (to collect funds, organize rotation of the voluntary kitchens, etc.). Such organization represents a big step forward if it is kept in mind that since September 11, 1973, no sort of mass organization whatsoever has existed. Beginning from organizing such elementary demonstrations as the soup kitchens, another problem begins to be resolved: the reconstruction of nuclei of natural mass leaders, on the población level, for example. The policy of the dictatorship consists in assassinating or imprisoning the most combative leaders. In many cases it has attained its goal. It is through such forms of organization as the soup kitchens, such modest struggles, that the most advanced workers, pobladores, peasants, and students have linked up with the masses to make the first experiments of organization and to direct the initial forms of resistance to the dictatorship. Beginning from that, these most advanced elements find themselves in position to organize and lead new struggles. In a few cases these most advanced sectors are grouped into stable clandestine organizations allowing them to prepare new forms of struggle in a continuous manner. That is the function of the Committees of Popular Resistance. The program of these committees is derived from the requirements of the struggle to overthrow the dictatorship. All those who are ready to struggle for that goal can participate in the committees, provided the necessary security measures are observed. In every struggle the problem immediately arises of extending the struggle further. It is necessary to begin preparing conditions that will make such extensions possible. That is why we are making use of the experiences we had under the Unidad Popular with the cordones industriales and the comandos comunales to direct our efforts toward creating centers of coordination among the various cells of the resistance belonging to given sectors or specific fronts. Q. Has progress already been made in this regard? A. The development of these organizational structures and the struggles we have just been speaking of have been purely embryonic up to now. The organization of resistance has been stabilized only in a few areas. Q. What is the importance of these forms of struggle and of democratic demands and wage demands? A. For us revolutionary Marxists they have a purely tactical dimension. Like the struggle for the over-
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dictatorship changing the "moder!
throw of the dictatorship, the struggles of the proletariat must never be dependent solely on economic and democratic demands. Whenever conditions permit, they must be pushed in the direction of demands that have an ever higher content. We can never forget that only the victory of socialism (and not the development of progressive bourgeois sectors) will resolve the problems of the exploited masses. We are struggling for socialism, and this struggle demands full political independence of the exploited masses. BRAZIL the BY RUY MARIANO • Since the coup in Chile, Brazil has ceased to occupy first place among bloody regimes in the international bourgeois press. Confronted by an incomparably more conscious mass movement than their Brazilian counterparts are facing, the Chilean gorillas have unleashed a massive repression never before seen in Latin America. In this they have taken the place previously occupied by the Brazilian rulers. Other factors, however, have also emerged in the past several months that have contributed to "