The crisis of Allende's Popular Unity government has deepened over the past month, with strong right-ward moves by the CP and other forces. The events of May 12th in Concepcion brought the crisis to a head. A student was killed and others injured in a police charge against a left-wing counter-demonstration to an anti-government Christian Democrat rally. Not only did the CP fail to participate in the counter-demonstration, organised by the MIR, Socialist Party and other left groups, but the police operations were supervised by the city's Communist Party mayor.
The resulting polarisation between the CP and the revolutionary left, together with the developing crisis of the Chilean economy and the attempts of the bourgeois parties to take advantage of the situation, forms the background able for imperialism. Its strategy will be to to the governmental crisis of the past few days. The CP's line is now clearly to "consolidate the gains" made by Popular Unity, and negotiate with the Christian Democrats over the government's composition and propramme. The precarious nature of these "gains", however, is more than evident in what the Christian Democrats themselves are engaged in doing at the moment-fighting for a bill in Congress to strengthen the armed forces of the bourgeois State, and subject "armed groups" to military law. Allende has bent to the bourgeois pressures in the Popular Unity camp. Because of the strong challenge to these manoeuvrings from elements in his own Socialist Party-which were accusing him of selling out to the Stabinists-the composition of the new Cabinet announced on Sunday does not reflect very dramatic changes. The independent left-winger Vuskovic, who had drawn up fairly extensive nationalisation and income redistribution plans, is kicked out of the Economics Ministry, and the CP ministers more clearly represent the line of conciliation with the bourgeois parties. The key point, however, is that the way is still very much open to negotiations with the Christian Democrats. A situation is which Allende is being pulled to the right is obviously increasingly favourwork for the further isolation of the revolutionary left. There are undoubted weaknesses among the forces which have been struggling to advance the struggles of the masses, and prepare for the armed confrontation with the forces of the bourgeois State. The MIR made a step forward many months ago when it broke from Popular Unity over the use of the police and army against land occupations etc. But the continuing confusion in its ranks was apparent in the rapprochement of elements in the MIR and the CP, which was broken off 30 members of the PSU, quite a few holding positions of responsibility in the organisation, joined the Ligue Communiste. Now another 36, including members of the national student leadership, members of the political leadership in Paris and the organiser in the municipal and nationalised industries in the key region of Normandy, have also left the PSU to join the Fourth International. We print below the letter they sent on joining the Ligue Communiste. When we examine the state of the French left today we find that spontaneism has shown itself impotent in the face of reformism and that Maoism is in a general state of degeneration and disintegration. Of the vanguards that emerged from the student movement in the late sixties, only the organizations calling for only by the events in Concepcion (even on the. day after the murder of the student Caamano, the MIR was engaged in joint operations with the CP in university elections); and despite its wide and growing influence among the masses, it has no programme adequate to the coming struggles. Nonetheless, there is no easy road for the strategy of the bourgeois section of the government: the acuteness of the economic crisis offers even less possibility of making concessions to the masses (Chile is facing its biggest foreign exchange crisis yet), and the militant tendencies in the base of the governmental parties-the Socialist Party in particular -are increasingly engaging in action with the revolutionary left groups. These latter have made advances both in thetrade unions (especially the coal miners' and textile workers' unions) and in the peasant organisations.
Allende's patched up coalition is unhappily balanced between the contending forces. The decisive question now is the ability of the revolutionary forces, and of the MIR as the strongest organisation among them, to give leadership to the masses against the class traitors in Popular Unity, the CP tore most among them, who are attempting to restore bourgeois rule to more "normal" forms. J.W.
is complemented by a consistent organizational practice that tests in everyday intervention the general political line, The existence of the Ligue Communiste proves that the choice is not between the apoliticism of the spontaneist movement and the dogmatism of a 'Trotskyist sect' but that the revolutionary Marxist road is always open. It is therefore by joining this organization that we feel we can contribute best to the building of an authentic COmmunISE DarLY.
NOTES: 1. French Communist Party 2. C.P.dominated trade union federation. 3. Michel Rocard, general secretary of the PSU. 4. Yvan Craipeau, Histore de Movement Trotskyste en France, Paris 1972, p.30. Campaign against the trials Castro during his recent visit to Chile side Czechoslovakia. Therefore: because we believe that socialism has nothing to do with a police state; because we know that armed intervention-even qualified as "soviet"- against all the people of Czechoslovakia has, in several hours, done more against socialism than years of anti-communist propaganda or the "conspiracies" that supposedly justified such intervention in the first place; because we cannot let the Husaks, Bilaks or Strougals assume the right to distribute either diplomas of socialism or epithets of counter-revolutionary, we say: defending socialism belongs to those who fight for it, not those who cut its throat. Today this fight involves the defence of Czech prisoners. It is no longer possible to keep to isolated "disapproval", as if the armed inter-