Usually the political currents of reformist parties affirm that it is fundamental to win popularly elected positions, since this is the only way to guarantee, in a “democracy” desired structural changes so that the “savage” effects of capitalism are limited. If workers’ or popular organizations were to reach the head of state institutions through elections, this would allow changes. In Chile, most of the political currents of the left defend this policy by encompassing it in the idea of “anti-neoliberalism.”
By Roberto Monares
The State, democracy and its class character
As we wrote in previous article, the 10 richest families in Chile and the transnationals dominate the Chilean State. They use the “legal system” and also force for their own interests. That State, which in Chile is a “State of law” has a class character, as we wrote in a previous note in the latest edition of Workers’ Voice. To maintain the domination of the big capitalists, the State is supported by constitutions, laws, decrees, international treaties and a long etc. Examples in Chile include the law of mining concessions, Decree 3500 of the AFPs, the Labor Code of José Piñera, etc. and to enforce that legality, it uses the armed forces and law enforcement.
The legal system needs its justification and social support in “ideology.” A discourse that allows millions to work in harsh conditions and only a very few to live a life of luxury and privilege. It is a reality of inequality and violence disguised as “equality” and the “common good”. The current political constitution proclaims “People are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and “The State is at the service of the human person and its purpose is to promote the common good, for which it must contribute to create the social conditions that allow each and every one of the members of the national community their greatest possible spiritual and material fulfillment, with full respect for the rights and guarantees that this Constitution establishes.” Another example of this need to “justify” the State are the curricular contents of universities and schools, the mass media, or appealing to the “independence of the judiciary” to solve conflicts and violence.
However, reality is different from what is written in the laws. In the real world, the appropriation of natural resources and the daily exploitation of workers generates permanent instability and contradictions of varying intensities, resulting in marches, housing committees, strikes, and even revolutionary crises such as that of October 18, 2019. When ideologies fail to contain discontent, the legal system is sustained by the exercise of violence. In the origins of the State of Chile in the 19th century, violence was exercised against the native peoples in the so-called “pacification of Araucania” .1 Also, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the workers’ massacres perpetrated by the Chilean Army, such as the massacre of the Santa Maria School in Iquique in 1907 or the massacre of peasants in Ranquil in 1934, perpetrated by the nascent Carabineros corps, to mention two examples.2
The police forces and the Army exist to guarantee the “efficiency” of the State. But this is not only history, it is ongoing. The prolongations of the states of emergency in the Wallmapu, with the militarization of the Araucanía by the government of Gabriel Boric, or the recent evictions of the land seizures, or the repression of workers in the face of strikes that escape the traditional schemes of the labor code, manifest the continuity and reality of the class character of the state in 2024.
The CP of Chile in the “great agreements of democracy”
The maintenance of the bourgeois character of the state cannot be realized without a “political staff.” The government and parliamentarians go through elections. The judiciary, prosecutors, officers of the armed forces and Carabineros, do not. These “democratic” institutions, as we wrote in the previous note, are connected and subjected, through different networks and mechanisms, to economic power. For their part, the parties of the past thirty years, from the Right to the PS, created their networks of clientelist militancy in the various services of the state administration, doing business with “friendly” or “family” businessmen with the resources of public services. The municipalities are generally the first step of the small coalitions, to advance in the school of this “personnel” reliable for the interests of the bourgeoisie. That is why corruption in the State-business relationship, far from being a specific problem of a certain coalition, is an expression of the whole of the parties that administer the State. This process is dynamic, with new generations, and naturally there are centenary parties or with decades in the administration of the bourgeoisie’s businesses, such as the UDI, RN. Others, such as the PS, which were integrated in the decade of the 80s-90s or the most recent ones, where former leaders of the student struggles were integrated, such as the Frente Amplio and the Communist Party. 3
The central definitions of the CP of Chile in its call to the XXVII National Congress ratify its “anti-neoliberal” strategy in the government of Gabriel Boric: “It is necessary to look at history, to build the future. Considering that the contradiction Democracy-Neoliberalism and the democratic revolution with a socialist perspective is fully in force “4. For the CP of Chile, there is a main contradiction between neoliberalism and democracy. In defense of Boric’s government and to justify his presence in the government, he says: “The result of the plebiscite collapsed the left hegemony to pass to a stage of siege of the government by the opposition and a conditioned support of our bills, on the part of the pendulum parties. The boycott in Parliament has been accentuated. The permanence of the communists in the government had dramatic and tragic edges both during the government of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla and Salvador Allende, and with its own complexity now in the government of Gabriel Boric. Our enemies and adversaries have always tried to associate the presence of the communists in the exercise of power with disorder, insecurity and chaos “5.
But let us go to the relation of words with facts.6 What perspective of socialism does the politics of the CP of Chile have? How much does the CP bother the big businessmen? What was its role in the revolutionary process in Chile opened on October 18 and up to the present?
The days of October 2019, which shook the country with millions in the streets, exercising self-defense and revolutionary violence, were channeled to the Agreement for Social Peace and the New Constitution of November 15, 2019. With the pandemic in between, the agreement succeeded in diverting the revolutionary process in a Chile that was on fire. The Communist Party, faithful to its need to take care of democracy, although it did not sign the agreement to maintain “contact with the streets,” quickly came to its defense, later giving its votes in Parliament, in January 2020, to “improve the agreement.” It was also responsible for lowering the mobilization calls made by the CUT and its unions demanding “Piñera Out.” Then, during the pandemic, the CP gave governability to the Piñera government with the approval of suspension and unemployment laws (“employment protection law”), and helped to promote the second constituent process, with a “commission of experts,” which had already reached the agreements of the new constitution even before the constituent process, agreements that kept the country in the hands of big business.
Now, the CP is a central part of Boric’s government, which in its first two years approved the TPP11, the CODELCO-SQM protocol that gives lithium to Ponce Lerou’s Somiquich until 2060, keeps the Wallampu militarized, and has already said it will approve laws to reduce “permitting” for “extractivist” projects. Although the CP sometimes votes against controversial projects, its sole objective is to maintain its influence among the most critical activists (“one foot in the government, one foot in the street”). As a party, they are a fundamental part of a bourgeois and neoliberal government, that is, they are the “replacement” personnel of the bourgeois state.
The Communist Party, contrary to what Marxism historically states, defends that the bourgeois State is a “State of law,” which could change according to the “anti-neoliberal” policy of whoever administers it. Reality shows the opposite. When they reach the government, the old and new “anti-neoliberal” parties end up administering neoliberal capitalism, because the State and its institutions are controlled by the big capitalists. The CP today is a tool of the big bourgeoisie, even if it has to appear as a critical and left-wing party in order not to lose its electorate.
Notes:
1. Bengoa, José (2000 [1985]). Historia del pueblo mapuche: siglos XIX y XX. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones.
2. Vitale, Luis (2000). Intervenciones militares y poder fáctico en la política chilena (de 1830 al 2000).
3. It is relevant to identify this process of “school of government” of the Frente Amplio in municipalities such as Providencia in 2012 or the Ministry of Education in the second government of Michelle Bachellet. In the case of the Communist Party, after obtaining in regions its first mayorships and deputations by a pact of “omission” with the Concertación, it advanced to Senators and central municipalities of the metropolitan region, such as Santiago and Recoleta.
6. Following the method of the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, “The problem consists in verifying their sincerity, in confronting words with facts, in not being satisfied with idealistic or vainiloquent phrases, but in seeing the class reality”.
