Regis Debray, "Conversations with Allende" £1.05, pp 190. [illegible] Red Books £1.25, [illegible]
The reader will not find in this book a completed Marxist analysis of the perspectives for Salvador Allende's Popular Unity Government in Chile—rather it is an invaluable source book and document for developing such an analysis. Regis Debray's lengthy introduction is packed with historical information and allusive political insights, none of which adds up to a clear political evaluation of Allende's 'Chilean road'. Debray's evident reservations about the course on which the Allende Government is set are distinctly wrapped up in such formulations as the following: the 'successful conclusion' of the class struggle in Chile 'requires more from the popular officials, and from the people themselves than what they can yet give in organisation, leadership and defensive and counter-offensive — (in the politico-military and not just the technical sense of the term)." Cautiously [illegible] [de]cade of gaps and dislocations leads finally to a certain lack of a political leadership capable of mobilising and [illegible]. [What Debray and others] mean by this is huge street demonstrations [illegible].
[Debray's questioning clearly] stimulating the mass movement at every level. The governmental function cannot of itself stand in for the function of the political vanguard........This relative failure of political leadership is not without its immediately practical and universally obvious effect: the divorce that exists today between the under-mobilisation of the mass revolutionary forces and the virtual and actual over-mobilisation of the minoritarian counter-revolutionary forces". However Debray's awareness of these discrepancies does not prevent him from expressing the weak hope that everything will turn out for the best after all. The second section consisting of two long conversations with Allende is much more satisfactory since Debray is in no way over-awed by Allende and presses him hard on many vital issues. Allende emerges as an almost classically centrist figure. Interestingly enough this man [illegible] even left social democrat and Stalinist is himself not quite either of these. He has courageously defended the Cuban revolution and the guerrilla fighters when it would have been safer to [keep] quiet. He likes to quote not only Lenin [but] also Che Guevara and [T]rotsky. But somehow he always managed to insist that the teachings of these men do not quite fit the Chilean situation, that the Chilean 'revolution' can magically escape the laws of the class struggle. In some ways the class content of the Allende Government is more advanced than the conventional experience of Popular Front Governments: it is overwhelmingly dominated by workers parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, the former a conventional Stalinist Party similar to those to be found in France or Italy, the latter a 'left socialist' Party of an unconventional type, unaffiliated to the Second International and embracing in its ranks a politically disparate coalition. This adds up to being something very like a 'Workers Government' inhabiting a quite unreconstructed bourgeois state machine.
[illegible] Chilean working class. Both the Chilean [illegible] the Popular [Unity] [illegible]. What [Debray and others] mean by this is huge street demonstra[tions] of the sort that the Chilean trade unions can mount easily. The mobilisation of the masses and their support for the Workers Government totally lacks any permanent and institutional expression. At the time of the elections Popular Unity Committees were established by the Communist and Socialist Parties but neither party was willing to see these emerge as autonomous expressions of a new workers power which could eventually sustain a con[flict] with the bourgeois state machine. [illegible] and [were] not directly elected by, and res[ponsible to] [illegible]. [illegible] any question of [these] Committees becoming the nucleus of popular power [illegible] confrontation with the Army or Police. Although the nature of the political trap for Chilean workers is strikingly visible in these conversations, Debray does not sufficiently explore the complementary economic trap in which they have been placed by the Allende Government. The best Marxist analysis of the changing nature of imperialism in Latin America emphasises the swing away from the traditional sector for investments (mining, plantations and the like) and towards subsidiary light and medium industry and services (see for example E. Mandel International Vol. 1, No. 5 and A. Quijano, 'Nationalism and Capitalism in Peru' Monthly Review July-August 1971). Seen in the perspective of this shift in the axis of imperialism the Allende Government's economic program, even if it is permitted to pursue it, could become little more than a rationalisation of imperialist investment in Chile. Unfortunately Debray does not really probe Allende on the implications of his economic policy in such a thorough manner as he does with the more strictly political issues.
Debray's notes to the Conversation section give valuable summaries of the Chilean political history and current situation and can be recommended to all those whose interest was only recently awakened. A basic orientation document produced by the MIR on the Allende Government is published as an appendix to the book. They seek to raise all those questions about the state and popular power which the Allende Government is determined to dodge. At the same time they have sought to mobilise the rural and urban masses at the base through seizures of land, occupation of buildings etc. However although their actions and their program as outlined in this book seem all admirable it is of course difficult to know from this distance whether the MIR really possesses all the necessary attributes for the most demanding of all roles: that of the revolutionary Party in a revolutionary situation.