A leading member of the Fourth International, Livio Maitan, replies to views expressed by the Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti in a mass-circulation Italian weekly following the Chilean coup.
‘Our business is to help get everything possible done to make sure there is a “last” chance for a peaceful development of the revolution, to help by the presentation of our Programme, by making clear its national character, its absolute accord with the interests and demands of a vast majority of the population. Russia is a country of the petty bourgeoisie, by far the greater part of the population belonging to this class. Its vacillations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are inevitable, and only when it [illegible] the proletariat is the victory of the revolution, of the [illegible] peace, freedom, and land for the working people [illegible] easily, peacefully, quickly, and smoothly.’ Not Bernstein but Lenin. And Lenin not in 1894 but on 26-7 September 1917, ‘Under no circumstances can the party of the proletariat set itself the aim of “introducing” socialism in a country of small peasants so long as the overwhelming majority of the population has not come to [illegible] the need for a socialist revolution. We are not [illegible], we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority. We are Marxists.’
[illegible] wherever liberal or infantile-leftist literature [illegible], the problem of revolution for Marxism is not that of a choice between peaceful road and violent road. The problem is how to proceed to genuine and deep transformation [illegible]. No self-respecting Marxist—neither Lenin, nor Trotsky, nor Luxemburg—has seen even the dictatorship of the proletariat itself as the ‘quickest way’, a pure act of military force, the antithesis of democracy, the power of a minority or a substitute for the consent of the people. The alternative legality/violence is an old blind alley. The ‘violence’ which matters is the transformation of real structures; the ‘legality’ which counts is the consent of the majority. Both things are indispensable. For just as the structures cannot be transformed without the participation of the broad masses (what is involved is after all the installation of new social relations), so there can be no socialism without political struggle, without freedom of the press and the right to strike, without opposition and genuine elections.
The Popular Unity’s undertaking was not simply a reedition of the old popular fronts. It is therefore an error to apply to Allende the criticisms which are valid against Leon Blum. The limit of the old popular front was not that it maintained the framework of political democracy. It was that, within this framework and behind the facade of anti-fascism, the real structures remained unscathed. In the case of the Popular Unity, on the other hand, what was involved was precisely an attempt to combine a profound (albeit gradual) transformation of those structures with a mass political democracy. The objection is made that the attempt failed partly—indeed above all—because the ‘framework of legality’ had become too constraining, even debilitating. What was necessary was to arm the people (even if only 40% of them), to disarm the [illegible], to suppress the opposition newspapers and radio stations, [illegible] the rest of society. On Sunday morning at the barber's, everything is easier. But perhaps the real relations of force were not precisely those which certain friends imagine.
Yet the problem is a different one. What makes the dictatorship of the proletariat impracticable today, in the form and manner in which it was originally conceived of (and which, it should be said, was never as the dictatorship of a party or a simple minority governing through a police State, without strikes, without freedom of expression, without open opposition or political struggle), is the course of capitalist development. Neither, it is true, was the dictatorship of the proletariat seen by Marx or Lenin as avoiding the problem of consent and of democracy exercised. However, it presupposed for them the schema or model of a society in which a full capitalist development had homogenized and simplified to the maximum the social structure and stratification, reducing nine tenths of the population to workers and technicians in industry (including even agriculture)—a situation which only exists in the United States today—and at the same time isolating a tiny minority as a counter-revolutionary pole. This is why they thought the very dictatorship itself would be the highest form of democracy: the overwhelming majority—‘90% it was claimed—would expropriate a handful of exploiters. The October Revolution itself presupposed this model. Socialism was impossible in Russia; the dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible. But in the meantime the position was being held, even if only through a dictatorship of the party, until the revolution took place in Germany, where the economy and war planning had shown, according to Lenin, the actuality and correctness of Marx's model.
However, in reality things turned out differently. The societies of today—not only those which are relatively less developed, but also those where capitalist concentration and centralization have reached the highest degree—show a wide spectrum of social strata, with diverse and at times directly competing interests: peasants (various levels of these), petty and medium bourgeoisie, professional layers, sub-proletariat, industrial proletariat, etc. And here the operation becomes more complex. That homogeneous social composition, that uniformity or immediate identity of interests among nine tenths of the population which the theory foresaw at the height of capitalist development has hitherto been realized only at the other extreme: in other words, in backward countries with an overwhelming preponderance of poor peasants. Here, in the absence of great modern, centralized masses of producers, and hence in the absence of the conditions for effective democracy, restricted political elites (for the most part military ones) or charismatic leaders have been able to introduce sweeping measures of rationalization—from wholesale nationalization to all the other experiments in profane form which have been seen.
It does not appear that conditions in Chile were of this kind. Let us leave aside the possible tactical errors which nobody can evaluate seriously from here (though it is certain that, even if one was attempting a peaceful transition and even if one had an absolute majority behind one, one ought to be able to prepare some defences). Let us also leave aside the economic isolation imposed by imperialism, and the conservative role of the Christian Democrats (there as here)—indisputable as these things were. Would events have taken a different course if an appeal to the people had been made a few months earlier through a plebiscite? The possible tactical errors constitute the unrepeatable aspect of the Chilean experience. But what remains, what the left must set itself the task of discussing at all costs—rejecting with contempt the too easy advice of Tass—is the economic situation in the three years of Popular Unity government. Here all the problems of even of a relatively little-articulated social stratification leap to the eye and give an idea of the complexity of the situation. The lorry-drivers who strike for months on end represent small and medium property which fears nationalization more than death; they make one understand how the ‘demand for communism’ in the modern world does not always have precisely the same force as it has in our heads. The peasants who, after the [illegible] of the [illegible], refuse cooperative working on a Kolkhoz model and slaughter their animals [illegible] reality. Finally, the [illegible] of El Teniente who, with a month-long strike, fight to keep their wages higher than those of other workers, make us understand that it is not always enough to evoke ‘class consciousness’ in order to obtain it.
What this tragic experience teaches us, in my opinion, is not the impossibility of socialism nor that Allende was [illegible] were horrifyingly difficult, more difficult than they already are always and in themselves. That the road to socialism imposes a complex political plan, problems of unification and alliance between differentiated social forces and, therefore, a difficult choice of common objectives, with a correct evaluation of the weight of such forces as will be discarded at each stage. Above all, it teaches us that the left must rack its brains, that there are many things which have to be rethought from the beginning, in order to make socialism also into a society which works.
The first sentence of this quotation can be found in Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26, ‘The Tasks of the Revolution’, p. 60, [and the] two sentences on the preceding page. [International]
The first sentence of this quotation can be found in Lenin, Selected Works in three volumes, Moscow 1967, Vol. 2, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution’, 10 April 1917, p. 37; the rest of the passage quoted can be found in the same volume, p. 20, in ‘The Dual Power’, 9 April 1917. [International]