Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende's Chile
248
Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende's Chile
248eBook
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Learn more about the author and this book in an interview published online with Jacobin.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520970175 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
"We Lived Those Years with a Lot of Passion"
University Reform and the Rise of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria
At seventeen, Margarita González left home to enroll in the University of Concepción. Like many other college students, she felt a mix of excitement and uncertainty as she left behind the comfort and safety of her family. As a student, she gained newfound independence: "I stopped being a girl sheltered by a large family and became a young university woman in charge of my own life." Without house chores and curfews, Margarita had freedom to decide how she spent her time and with whom. She had time for classes and studying but also for debate and reflection with her peers. Growing up with nine siblings, she was used to sharing close quarters, but the residence hall's sheer diversity of students — "from wealthy families &tgrave;'o working-class families to very poor families, from northern Chile to central and southern Chile, from cities and rural areas" — was thrilling. Politics, she soon discovered, was the currency of intellectual exchange. Margarita had arrived in this southern industrial city and its campus at a very particular moment: March 1968.
Student protest and calls for university reform came to the fore around the world in the mid-1960s and peaked in 1968. Chile was no exception. Campus activism often began by questioning power structures within the university, then challenged the status quo as a whole. In the process, students transformed both society and themselves. In Chile, university reform movements swept through the Catholic and state universities in Valparaíso, Santiago, and Concepción. Students called for a co-government arrangement that would grant faculty, staff, and students shared administrative power. In tandem with this desire to democratize the university, students fought to expand access to higher education. Nothing in these Chilean student demands in 1968 was new; rather, they drew inspiration from the 1917 "Grito de Córdoba," which had launched university reform in Argentina. The difference was their success.
By 1969, student movements had transformed every major Chilean university — from the more abstract allocation of resources and power to the more palpable questions of what students could study, who taught them, and who gained admission. The 1960s saw a fivefold increase in university enrollments across Chile, from approximately 25,000 to 145,000. In Concepción, enrollments doubled between 1961 and 1968, from 2,685 students to 5,770, and tripled during Margarita González's years on campus. As a direct result of the university reforms, Concepción enrolled nearly 20,000 students in 1973.
Margarita's experience as a university student in the late 1960s was indelibly shaped by the sense that she was living in an exceptional moment in her country's history. Decades later she recalled, "We lived those years with a lot of passion. It was a turbulent time: the birth of the MIR [Revolutionary Left Movement], calls for university reform, real possibilities for a Socialist president and a socialist project in Chile. These were experiences that shaped my life forever. As students, we made decisions. We took political stances. My second year studying medicine [coincided with] a moment of important political effervescence and I became a militant [of the MIR]." How did Margarita come to see political militancy in a revolutionary organization as the most promising avenue to confront the injustices ingrained in Chilean society? Her personal and political transformation allows us to ask, Why did university students reemerge as political actors in the mid-1960s? And why specifically in the Chilean context did Concepción become the epicenter of a revolutionary movement?
At the University of Concepción, I argue, the university reform process was mutually constitutive with the turn to revolutionary politics. Despite being founded in Santiago in August 1965, Chile's iconic and controversial revolutionary Left — the MIR — has long been closely associated with Concepción and its combative student movement. The struggle for university reform (1964–69) heralded the MIR's arrival on the national political scene and provided a training ground for the generation of student leaders who took over the MIR's national leadership in 1967. Against the backdrop of student protests, Concepción and then national MIR leaders Miguel Enríquez, Bautista Van Schouwen, and Luciano Cruz deepened their commitment to building a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. The former Concepción medical students restructured the party toward that end in 1969, tightening membership requirements, taking the party underground, and sending Concepción students out to build the party in other regions. By 1973, most of the top national and regional leaders were former Concepción students. This is the known story of the university reform movement and the MIR: the audacity of its student leaders in radicalizing the Concepción movement gave the MIR greater visibility and catapulted the medical students turned MIR leaders into the national spotlight.
Yet the struggle for university reform generated much broader ripples in Chilean society, transforming not just the MIR as a political organization and regional politics in Concepción but also individual students' lives. The push to democratize the university became linked to the democratization of daily life. These other legacies of the 1960s student movement shaped the regional experience of Chile's revolution in the years ahead. Armed with little more than radical aspirations and Marxist ideals, young militants in Concepción successfully forged networks of militancy across class lines. This cross-class political project started on campus with students like Margarita González.
This chapter examines the particularities of Concepción student politics to explain how the university reform movement accelerated a revolutionary project on and beyond the campus. In the face of authorities' intransigence and police brutality, student demands radicalized. Even as the national MIR's public declarations defended the legitimacy of violence to usher in socialist revolution, the Concepción university reform was a democratic process shaped by transforming an institution from within. The university reform movement laid the foundation for the MIR's subsequent modus operandi — not as armed insurrection, but as grassroots organizing driven by mass participation, direct action, and radical democracy.
FOUNDING THE MOVIMIENTO DE IZQUIERDA REVOLUCIONARIA, AUGUST 1965
In September 1964, Chileans went to the polls to elect a new president. After the heated campaign cycle, Christian Democrat (DC) Eduardo Frei Montalva won an unprecedented absolute majority (56%). The leftist Frente de Acción Popular (FRAP; Popular Action Front) coalition candidate Salvador Allende finished a distant second (39%) in a two-way race. It was the third electoral defeat for the Socialist physician, whose support had increased from 1958, when he narrowly missed being elected president with 29% of the vote in a four-way race. Debates arose within the ideologically diverse Chilean Left over whether the decades-long strategy of Popular Front coalition politics was spent. These conversations were not confined to party leaders but also took place across Chile, in factories, schools, and universities. For radical sectors outside the Socialist and Communist Parties, Allende's defeat confirmed their conviction that change would not come from the ballot box. The radical Christian labor leader Clotario Blest had spent years trying to unify Chile's dispersed revolutionary Left factions. This project became a reality when sixty delegates converged on an anarchist shoemakers' union in Santiago on August 15, 1965, to found the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria.
The MIR presented itself as the Marxist-Leninist vanguard that would lead a socialist revolution in Chile. Its founders purposefully used the term "revolutionary Left" to differentiate the MIR from the "reformist" Chilean Communist Party and "movement" to signal their distrust of political parties' tendency to divide the working class. The MIR's founding charter criticized the "bureaucratic leaderships of the traditional left," who "defraud workers' hopes" by offering "reforms to the capitalist regime" and who "deceive workers with a permanent electoral dance, forgetting direct action and the revolutionary tradition of the Chilean proletariat." With the explicit goal of "overthrow[ing] the capitalist system and [replacing it] with a government of workers and peasants," the MIR embraced class struggle and endorsed armed popular insurrection as the only means to bring socialism to Chile. At the first congress, Miguel Enríquez presented the Concepción delegation's "Political-Military Thesis" outlining the MIR's proposal for popular insurrection. Although many in the MIR admired the 1959 Cuban Revolution, by 1965 the disastrous attempts to export revolutionary guerrilla focos to other Latin American countries were sufficiently graphic to dissuade the Chilean organization from pursuing the same strategy. Instead, to ensure that armed groups would have wide support, the older generation of leaders tempered the Concepción students' proposal by specifying that sufficient radicalization of popular movements was a precondition to launching an armed insurrection.
Despite the MIR's self-fashioned rupture, according to the historian Eugenia Palieraki, its origins lay in the history of the Chilean Left and Chilean political culture. From the moment of its founding, the MIR was a heterogeneous mix of generations, ideological influences, and political organizations. Its creation in 1965 provided important continuity between the 1920s and 1930s generation of Trotskyists, Socialists, and radical syndicalists and the 1960s generation of young self-styled revolutionaries. The majority of its older militants had been expelled from the Central Única de Trabajadores de Chile (CUT; Chilean National Labor Federation), the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party in the 1950s, many of the younger ones from the Socialist and Communist Youth Parties in the 1960s. Founding members brought their political formation in the Old Left to bear on the internal organization of the MIR, adopting the Socialist Party's internal party structure based on cells and the Communist Party's same Leninist principle of centralized decision making as binding for all members. More than just an inherited, hierarchical party structure, the newly formed MIR also drew on the Old Left's successful methods of direct action, grassroots activism, and participatory democracy and reinvigorated them with renewed calls for revolutionary change. The MIR's grassroots expansion during the Allende years resulted from its ability to work within the Chilean political tradition, not outside it.
EL MOVIMIENTO UNIVERSITARIO DE IZQUIERDA: CONCEPCIÓN'S PROLOGUE TO THE MIR
Leftist students at the University of Concepción launched a grassroots movement, the Movimiento Universitario de Izquierda (MUI; Leftist University Student Movement), in October 1964, preceding the creation of the MIR by nearly a year. "The basic organizational principle guiding the MUI," noted a student journalist, "is revolutionary democracy, which means decisions are not made by the leaders who turn their backs on the masses but rather by the masses themselves in direct form." The will of the majority resolved any dispute in university-wide assemblies. The MUI combined assembly-based participatory political culture with highly visible direct actions, including marches and skirmishes with police in the city center and strikes and the occupation of buildings on campus. This combination of assembly politics and direct action created a repertoire of activism that underwrote the MIR's rapid expansion in Concepción province from a minority of Marxist students to a broad movement in favor of transforming not only the university but also society at large.
Enzo La Mura, a history student, was among the dissident Communist and Socialist students in the education and medical schools who came together to form the MUI. He had arrived in Concepción to finish high school in 1959. In contrast to a life "spent chasing after a bus" in Santiago, La Mura found that the provincial "Concepción offered time for other things." With more time to dedicate to reading, La Mura discovered his passion for history and for politics. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, La Mura joined the Communist Youth (JJCC) in 1960. He immediately noticed a difference between the seriousness of the older generation of Communists, who had lived through the repression and clandestine phase (1948–58), and those who had joined out of "affinity with el Che [Guevara]." He balked at the internal rigidity of the Party and the Stalinist tendencies of some of its members. "They made the mistake of trying to discipline me," he explained. "My circle of friends was a bohemian, party group, who liked to go out singing and to smoke hookahs. We were irreverent." The final straw for some Communist Youth like La Mura came when the Chilean Communist Party sided with the Soviet Union instead of the Cuban Revolution following the Sino-Soviet split in 1962. Despite being expelled from the organized youth wings of the Socialist and Communist Parties, many students like La Mura actively campaigned for Salvador Allende in 1964. It was afterward that the real disillusion set in, recalled La Mura, "and it radicalized things. Many of us stopped voting. I annulled my vote in 1965."
Yet the campaign experience inspired the desire for a new kind of politics. Allende himself admitted the failure to mobilize independent voters outside of party structures through autonomous committees that might be sustained after the election. The Communist and Socialist Parties tended to compete against each other to recruit people directly into their parties. Instead, La Mura recalled, "what was needed was a grassroots movement, and we identified with this idea because we had done something similar in the engineering school." The goal to build a campuswide grassroots organization that would unify all leftist students regardless of their party affiliation required not only expanding their supporters to include left-leaning independents but also overcoming suspicion and accusations of "divisionism" between the Socialist and Communist Youth Parties and the students who had left or, in some cases, had been expelled from them. In addition to open membership requirements, the MUI's internal organization differentiated it from other political entities. As La Mura explained, "Political parties functioned in bases or cells, predicated on obedience to party hierarchy. By contrast, the MUI functioned horizontally in assemblies, independent of any oversight" from regional or national party structures. Within the space of a few years, the MUI succeeded in bringing together diverse ideological tendencies around common goals: advance student struggles inside the university and advance toward socialist revolution in society.
The horizontal political practices of the MUI mirrored the University of Concepción's unique political culture where politics were practiced as a sport. Unlike other Chilean universities, Concepción student politics functioned as "a kind of direct democracy … [in which] everything was resolved in the assembly arena before hundreds of students." Decisions to go on strike were not made by the executive council of the Federación de Estudiantes de Concepción (FEC; Concepción Student Federation) but rather were put to a vote before an open FEC general assembly. These assemblies took place in the largest gymnasium on campus and routinely drew audiences of several thousand. The students sat by political bloc: Christian Democrats and supporters of the relatively moderate Radical Party congregated on the north side bleachers alongside the Right's small presence; and at the south end, New Left students (MUI) filled the stands next to Communists and Socialists. Assemblies frequently "opened with songs, chants, and taunts from one side to the other" before student leaders addressed the audience from the gym floor. The quality of their performance would be assessed by boos and applause. As an autonomous New Left coalition that operated outside party hierarchies, the MUI enjoyed greater freedom to radicalize student demands.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Maps ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. “We Lived Those Years with a Lot of Passion”: University Reform and the Rise of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria 15
2. “To Create a More Just Society”: Coal Miners and Textile Workers in the Revolutionary Workers Front 37
3. “By Our Own Means”: Socialist Utopia in Building Revolutionary Shantytowns 63
4. “Let the People Speak!”: Popular Democracy and the Concepción People’s Assemblies 90
5. “Building Their Own Power”: Grassroots Responses to the Bosses’ Lockout 115
6. “Living within a Special World”: The Unraveling Revolution and the Limits of the Vanguard 134
Epilogue: The Meaning and Memory of Radical Politics in the Twenty-First Century 162
Appendix: Sponsoring Organizations for the Concepción People’s Assembly, July 27, 1972 169
Notes 175
Bibliography 217