Nathaniel Whittemore

Latin American Revolutions

Paper 1

May 03, 2005

Prompt 2

Intro

The Chilean socialist experiment was an exciting moment of

confluence between different political and economic actors. It was also a

tragic lesson in the force that powerful minority interests can bring to bear

upon the rights of the collective. The relationship between the so-called

“revolution from above” and the “revolution from below” was never as

simple as shared or divergent goals and means. Salvador Allende’s Popular

Front provided a national context and revolutionary lexicon for the ongoing

localized frustrations of workers. The workers movements, such as that of

the Yarur mill, animated the movement at large and provided Allende’s

government with the resonant constituent base and demonstrable saliency it

needed to formally confront the existing order.

To some degree, the interplay between the two was based on

imagined relationships. The anxious workers appropriated the idea of

Allende as their own, projecting their struggled onto both the man and his

ideology. His real ideology imagined a relationship with the working class

that in some ways combined the patron system with socialism. Yet even in

the Yarur take-over crisis these two colliding imagined relationships were

able to inform real discourse and find political compromise and

maneuverability.

This paper explores the particular circumstances of those imagined

relationships and their brutal snuffing just a few years after they had

formed. The Chilean socialist experiment is the story of these relationships

and their extinction. Left to its own devices, it seems as though Allende’s

popular front socialism might have been buckled under its own political and

economic divisions and inefficiencies. Yet the truth of the situation remains

that the end of the movement came with the mobilization of incredibly

powerful minority and international actors.

The moment of new socialism

Allende’s Popular Front vision and the surging Chilean worker’s

revolution of the early 1970s were born into a set of circumstances that

reflected not only the economic, political, and industrial conditions of the

moment, but were predicated on a long history of worker activism and

changing demographics. Allende’s triumph at the polls and the Yarur

worker’s reclamation of their union were manifestations of a particular

moment in which local labor discontent finally found context in national

political momentum. The revolution from above and revolution from below

would, over the course of the coming months, shape, inform and give

strength to one another. At the same time, their sometimes-divergent

techniques, emphases and timing would threaten the socialist unity that was

the lifeblood of the movement for the overthrow of the old system of

exploitation. The interplay between the two was often rooted in the way in

which workers imagined Allende’s government and indeed, Allende himself,

in relation to themselves.

Allende’s 1970 campaign saw a very different electoral composition

than eighteen years earlier when he had first run for president. There had

been a doubling of eligible voters and increased power concentrations

within the lower class1. The composition of laborers at the Yarur mill

reflected these demographics and a particular combination of experiences

that went along with them.

The “Old Timers” were a group whose experience was that of

conditioned pessimism. Almost all had witnessed or been part of the

suppressed strike of 1962 and some had been there even earlier. For most,

the only politics that mattered were those of survival. The youngsters, on the

other hand, reflected a move in the Chilean industrial base from rural to

urban youth. These new circumstances of upbringing had implications for

the anxiousness of the young workers to improve conditions that went

beyond the fact of their youth itself.

For young Chileans, a move from countryside to city meant increased

contact with peers. The family ceased to be the singularly dominant social

unit as new communities, in the forms of class mates, neighborhood friends,

sports teams and other clubs came to occupy a significant place in the lives

1 Winn, “Weavers of Revolution,” 58

of young people. This was a world in which “loyalty” was increasingly the

most important characteristic of relationships and people’s friends came to

exert a stronger and stronger influence over decisions and actions.

At the same time as these new sorts of relationships were forming, the

Yarur factory was becoming increasingly de-personalized and de-humanized.

The patron system which relied so heavily on the personality of the leader

had not been successfully transmitted between generations of the Yarur

clan. Moreover, the system was predicated on a tangible sense that real

gains could (only) come from the individual relationship with the boss. It was

doomed to wither in the face of decades passed with work conditions the

same or worse as before. As Winn writes, the gifts of the patron system

“were double-edged, instruments of social control as well as expressions of

benevolence. Their intent was to bind workers to their boss by ties of

gratitude…and fears of losing those [benefits] already granted.”2 The last

vestiges of the system employed by Don Amador failed to resonate with a

younger group of workers not weaned with the same sense of filial piety as

the older generation.

More than that, the mechanization of the working process increased

the physical and social isolation of workers from one another. Indeed, this

mechanization was the final blow to any sustaining power of the old familial

patron system. The replacing Taylor System was an American innovation

designed to increase the productivity of the workers. While in purely

economical terms, it had the desired outcome; it also created an impersonal

situation in which labor was separated from the laborers. Indeed, the

workers became “extensions of the perpetual motion machines they

tended.”3 On page 46, Winn writes that “companerismo was another

casualty of the Taylor System – and paternalism perished with it as well.

There was no longer time to talk with other workers.”4 This was completely

at odds with the senses of community that had become increasingly

important in the social fabric of the young workers.

2 Ibid, 803 Ibid, 804 Winn, “Weavers of Revolution,” 46.

This was the situation that into which Allende came as he began to

campaign for his fourth presidential bid. For the Old Timers, he represented

the indefatigable spirit of past uprisings. He had been a part of the struggle

for so long that his perseverance gave a sense of continuity to the toil of

those who had languished in Yarur for decades. Like them he had risen up

time after time, only to be struck down by more powerful opponents. Allende

had run for president in 1952, 1958, and 1964, each time adding to his

electoral gains.5 In that way, Allende became the embodiment of the history

of Chilean labor struggle. As one man put it, “Salvador is a man formed in

this long struggle.” 6 For the older group of Yarur workers, his past

campaign defeats were not symbols of failure but rather of perseverance

and a sustained struggling against the tide. Moreover, while the youngsters

may not have been interested in the patron system, its roots still ran deep

for a large part of the Yarur body. Allende represented the best that a strong

leader could be. His candidacy was not even a question; there was no other

who could represent the Chilean people.

For the youngsters, too, the Allende Popular Front campaign of 1970

represented a very distinct ethos, as well. They had grown up in a new

urban situation in which “peers were the dominant influence of

adolescence.”7 Indeed, loyalty to companeros became the fundamental

currency of relationships. Urban class consciousness combined with new

community units such as sports clubs and social centers created new levels

of community.

Popular Front’s appeals gave a cohesive rhetorical voice to this sense

of community. Its calls for popular participation and democratic socialism

gave voice to the need for a unity and communalism in the face of an

isolating industry. In the language of the movement, friends became

comrades and loyalty became solidarity. Mirroring the social infrastructures

of their formative years, the Popular Front ideology envisioned “the creation

of organizations in workplaces and residential neighborhoods [to] ensure

that the {new power structure…built up from the grassroots} would be

5 Ibid, 566 Ibid, 557 Ibid, 85

exercised directly by the people themselves.”8 At the same time, Allende as a

man situated the role of the individual within the context of the new

emphasis on group rights.

Most of all, the new democratic socialism and the man who carried its

banner provided a national ideological, political, and economic context for

the visceral, immediate and localized pains experienced by the Yarur

obreros. His campaign reaffirmed for both groups, young and old, that their

frustrations and hopes for salvation were justified and not limited to solely to

their local community. Moreover, he helped inspire a massive shift in self-

perception, a “dramatic change in the workers’ view of themselves [and]

their capacity and power,” that was a “precondition for the revolution from

below.”9

Imagining relationships

Allende’s own vision of his movement relied on the same sorts of

imagined relationships that workers used to put context to their struggles.

For Allende, socialist politics was all about unifying the forces that could

bring about long-term sustainable change. This meant binding together the

destinies of the working class, middle class, and political elite. Allende saw

himself as the man to do this and as such, came to have a sense of the place

that each group would play in his coalition. The workers were largely

expected to cast their lot in and look to Allende for direction; indeed this

was the prerequisite for the tacit middle classes acceptance of socialist rule.

In this delicately balanced strategy of economic and political change, the role of the “masses” – workers, peasants, and pobladores – was to provide political and social support when called on, but otherwise to await patiently the advances and benefits of the revolution from above.10

Yet the truth was that throughout the country, Allende’s campaign

was driven by the lower toiling classes who had seized Allende as their own.

His rhetoric was generalized enough that it could connect with most of the

disaffected, and his movement broad enough that it could encompass a

spectrum of radicalism. While this delivered a popular victory, the unity

behind Allende was actually an obfuscation of reality. The truth was that

8 Ibid, 649 Ibid, 13610 Ibid, 140

many Allende’s had been elected, each customized to the particular

intensity, composition and discontent of his supporters. The aims of the

laborers who made up the “masses” “tended to be concrete – objectives that

responded to problems in their daily lives, but that they equated with

advacing the “revolution.””11 The conflict between these imaginations would

become clear over the course of the first year and a half of his presidency.

They were particularly on display in the crisis surrounding the Yarur mill

takeover.

As the parallel campaigns proceeded, the Yarur workers increasingly

relied on Allende’s surging campaign to demonstrate that there was hope in

popular action to the reticent members of the factory community, most often

the Old Timers. Winn writes that the message of the obreros “increasingly

joined their campaign for an independent union to Allende’s campaign for

the presidency.”12 They came to imagine Allende not simply as a politician

who would support them when he came to be elected, but as an extension of

themselves and their movement. Allende had incredible currency both as a

real figure and as a myth. This imagination was affirmed when, during his

campaign, he was permitted to speak to a crowd at the factory. With Amador

present, Allende promised that were he to be elected, he would wrest

control from his old acquaintance. The stunned crowd could hardly believe

their ears. There was no longer room for doubt; the moment had to be

seized.

Right in front of his workers, right there in his own factory, “Allende had told ‘El Chico’ that he was going to take his industry away from him.” The word soon spread through the mill to workers who had been afraid or unable to attend, shattering Amador Yarur’s image of omnipotence and triggering worker dreams.13

From that point onwards, the would-be union leaders employed the

mythology of Allende to convince the fearful that their best hope lay in

collective action and that for once, there would be a government that would

not intervene on the side of the owners. The closer union elections came, the

stronger the imagined personal relationship between the Yarur workers and

their companero president grew.

11 Ibid, 14112 Ibid, 9713 Ibid, 99

When he was finally elected president, it seemed to portent victory for

the Yarur’s own battle at the union polls set for a few months later. Indeed,

as Winn writes on page 104 “when Allende’s election was confirmed by the

Chilean Congress, they celebrated his triumph as their own.”14

“I was still celebrating…the following morning,” recalled Alma Galegos, a…former Yarur worker: “When Companero Allende was elected…it was like a carnival. It was something we had never expected…it was ajoy that couldn’t fit inside one.”15

Imaginations collide

As Allende set about consolidating his political base and allaying the

middle class fears of radical upheaval, the Yarur worker’s prepared for their

battle for the union. At the time, Allende’s slow moving leadership presented

no problems for the workers. His words of warning to Don Amador a few

months earlier still echoed throughout the halls of the factory. Moreover, his

election victory in and of itself was evidence enough of a changing tide.

Likewise, in this period of silent surging, the workers movement didn’t

appear to threaten the gradualism or hierarchy of the Allende ruling

coalition. It was not long before the apparently benign differences between

the techniques and emphasis of the parallel revolutions would be cast into

stark difference.

The imagined solidarity between the Yarur leftist leaders and the

Popular Front government began to be put to the test as the workers

revolution, which rightly felt itself the natural base of Allende, became

caught in its own momentum. The overwhelming success of the leaders in

regaining control of the union inspired the rank-and-file to desire more.

There were certain gains and changes, such as retirement annuities, that

would never be realized with Don Amador remaining at the helm.

The groundswell towards socializing the mill became rapidly more

uncontrollable, both for union leaders and government officials. Moreover,

the government found itself in the awkward position of being in total

ideological support of the workers but fearful of the rapidity with which

change was taking place and the degree to which it was orchestrated from

below, without confirmation of governing bodies. These factors caused major

ruptures within the Popular Front coalition. Still, the gradualist position of

14 Ibid, 10415 Ibid, 70

the president was more or less totally untenable with worker’s who were

responding not to political analysis but the immediacy of their own

frustration. For Yarur, the levy had broken, and the new union leaders

recognized that to try to slow the momentum of the movement would be like

asking the water to file orderly through the flood gates. As Winn writes on

page 141, “The deprived of Chile had taken Allende’s victory as their own

and were acting out its meaning in their own direct action.”16

The situation in which Allende found himself in April 1971 was one

which he was loath to deal with. Confronted with the takeover of the Yarur

mill, he had either to give up his gradualist position and risk setting a

precedent for unrestricted socialization of industry or support the ownership

classes in a clear case of monopolization and exploitation of workers. For a

week, the Yarur’s imagined relationship came crashing to reality with the

president. For most of the time it appeared as though he was going to

renege on his campaign promise to seize the mill. His initial veto of the plant

seizure was “to the union officers…a bewildering betrayal, an unanticipated

stab in the back.”17 It was, in the starkest terms, a competition between

imaginations.

Each party felt betrayed by the other as they recognized that the

relationships they had believed in could not be counted on. Allende couldn’t

fathom that the Yarur worker’s group had maneuvered outside of his own

authority to make the situation that now confronted them come to pass. At

the same time, the Yarur leaders believed that Allende’s democratic

socialism was predicated on listening to the masses and translating their

energies into political and economic realities. To some extent, they felt

themselves to be conveyers of a message from their companero president’s

constituent body, and were shocked to discover just how divergent his

sentiments were. Indeed, they believed that they were “fulfilling the Popular

Unity program and redeeming Allende’s campaign pledge.”18 As Winn

recalls, the particular constitution of the Yarur movement had been

informed by Allende himself.

16 Ibid, 14117 Ibid, 16818 Ibid, 139

Allende’s campaign speech at the mill planted the seed of socialism in [the worker’s] consciousness…and the events [that followed] brought about a dramatic transformation of consciousness and an inflation of expectations.19

Both parties tried passionately to convince the other of the expediency

and saliency of their own imagination. Allende reprimanded that there

needed to be a controlled pace of change orchestrated by state and local

actors simultaneously, while the union leaders argued that for the Yarur

workers, there were no politics but rather life on the line. The strands of

patronismo came through in the most intense moments of the debate. There

was no room in Allende’s mind for a revolution orchestrated without his

consent: “I am the president, and it is I who give the orders here!”20

In the end, the workers’ prevailed, and Allende ceded some political

control for ideological unity. The workers had been aided by the solidarity of

a number of Allende’s top ministers who threatened to resign if he handed

the Yarur mill back to its despicable owner. Allende’s final decision reflected

not only the strength of the workers arguments, but the very real fact that

he owed his presidency largely to their informal efforts. He had stated

earlier that “It was the people who chose me. My own party was against me,

the leaders of the Popular Unity were against me. But the people made me

their candidate.” It seemed that the power from below had exerted itself

again.

Dénouement

The months following the socialization of the Yarur mill provide

evidence for a number of scenarios that could have befallen the Chilean

socialist revolution. The delicate political alliance that Allende had build

began to see trouble. Workers around the country had become politicized,

and as such, individual parties within the Popular Front began to take

alternate courses. Whereas Allende had stressed unity as the technique of

revolution, groups within the alliance increasingly suggested more radical

methodologies, fracturing the coalition. Moreover, this radicalization led to

turmoil in the middle classes, who were being furiously courted by the right

nationalist parties and whose support Allende’s power hinged upon. The

more real the imagined relationship between the worker’s revolution from

19 Ibid, 13520 Ibid, 186

below became with the bureaucrats revolution from above, the more

accelerated the pace of upheaval became and the more nervous became

groups outside the proletariat. The Christian Democrat party benefited from

this tension, as more and more middle class Chileans were worried about

loosing their own property or status. The right and center parties allied and

became an increasingly forceful political unit. Allende’s presidency was

getting shaky.

At the same time, there was evidence that all was not lost. In the

Yarur mill, most agreed that “despite the failings and tensions, the balance

of that first year of comanagement was positive.”21 During the first year and

a half of worker management of the mill, production had actually been

turned around. The workers were able to “reverse the decline in output [for

the first time] since 1968.”22 Moreover, there was a sense that Ex-Yarur

demonstrated some advance towards egalitarianism and fraternity. Winn

says that the “factory became a community.” This was in spite of the sort of

political splintering occurring at the same time. Indeed, while an increased

number of political parties jeopardized the short term efficacy of Allende’s

Popular Front coalition, the greater participation in democracy had positive

long-term ramifications.

The workers of Ex-Yarur demonstrated that they were now prepared to vote, to speak their mind in public, to sign petitions, to join demonstrations, and to organize…23

It seems largely polemic, however, to speculate on would-haves. There

is plenty of evidence that Chilean socialism would have collapsed under the

weight of its economic and political problems. At the same time, there were

some indications that it might have been able to continually adapt itself.

What is undeniable is that the end of the experiment came from the

confluence of extremely powerful minority interests in the form of brutal

violent repression. In a few short months, Pinochet’s regime unmade all the

progress that Chilean socialism had achieved. Indeed, it can hardly be

characterized as “restoring” an older order; the force of methods of

repression created a controlled state unlike any Chile had seen. The actors

most notable in this drama were not the workers. To lay blame at their feet

21 Ibid, 21222 Ibid, 21223 Ibid 223

for their destruction denies the incredible force that the owner class was

able to bring to bear in co-opting the military apparatus. Moreover, it denies

the very significant involvement of wealthy international actors.

Conclusion

The death of the Chilean socialist dream was characterized, like the

movement itself, by the combination of imagination and reality. Real desires

for power as well as economic and military might colluded with the secretive

elements of an American foreign policy willing to imagine that anything was

better than even a democratic socialism. It was a modern tragedy which

demonstrated with painful authority that no amount of confluence of

political and economic dreaming is immune to the force of military might.

Yet it remains vital in understanding the Chilean and other revolutions to

examine the give and take of the “masses” and their leaders. In the Chilean

situation, the relationship was both real and imagined. While the real

Allende provided the spark of confidence needed to ignite the seething

passions of the working class, it was increasingly the emphases of that

cohort that came to define the man and his movement. It is, in some ways

fitting, that the final convergence of the revolutions from above and below

came in the simultaneous symbolic and physical martyrdom of their leaders.

In a hail of gunfire, the Pinochet regime erased the distinctions between

imagination and reality and created an entirely new mythology that would

have to sustain the Chilean workers until the next moment which found the

doors of possible change thrust open.