Events of decisive importance like those in Chile necessarily lead revolutionary militants and intellectuals who consider themselves Marxists to reflect upon them critically. But the impact of so tragic an experience can cause them to evolve in two diametrically opposed directions: towards a greater understanding of the method of the revolutionary break, or towards more or less consciously disguised revisionist positions.
Regrettably, it is the second path which has been taken by Lucio Colletti, despite the fact that, on the theoretical level, he has for many years made a significant contribution to the struggle against reformist and Stalinist deformations of Marxism. The article he wrote on Chile for ‘Espresso might, in fact, easily have been signed by Enrico Berlinguer—or at least by someone like Romano Ledda.’ The mystifying quotations, the attribution to revolutionary Marxism of arbitrary schemas, the distortions in his analysis, the vacuous appeal to the new as a cover for the offer of old, defective goods: all these classic ingredients of countless revisionist operations are present in Colletti’s three cursory columns, which end with an invitation to the left to ‘rack its brains’ and to ‘rethink many things from the beginning, in order to make socialism also into a society which works’.
For his own part, Lucio Colletti has certainly not done much racking of his brains. He begins, in fact, with a quotation from Lenin (from 26-7 September 1917), in ‘making sure there is a “last” chance for a peaceful development of the revolution’. It is worth recalling to the forgetful that the same quotation—and for the same purpose—was disinterred by the Khruschevites at the time of the Twentieth Congress, in an attempt to give an ‘orthodox’ cover to their neo-reformist theorizations on the peaceful road to socialism. But what the Khruschevites pretended to forget was the little detail that Lenin's hypothesis was one of a ‘peaceful’ coming to power in the framework of the revolutionary democracy represented by the Soviets—not organs of the bourgeois State but the expression of an alternative workers’ and peasants’ power. A little detail indeed! For Colletti to clutch in his turn at this particular life-belt is really pitiful; what is more, he forgets that even in that limited form the hypothesis was not translated into reality (nor has anything of the kind occurred in other revolutionary crises). Perhaps the reference [illegible] more in this case than concrete historical experience?
Colletti says correctly that the Chilean Popular Unity was not a re-edition of the old popular fronts. But he does not grasp the essential aspects of the difference when he says that ‘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.’ Before embarking on this theme, Colletti had already carried out the classic operation of revisionists—both old and new—which consists in obliterating the crucial moment, the qualitative leap of the proletariat’s seizure of power. Moreover, to say that ‘the “violence” which matters is the transformation of real structures; the “legality” which counts is the consent of the majority’ is precisely to avoid the problem—in reality unavoidable—of the break, of revolutionary violence, and to substitute for the concept of revolution which is essential in Marx and Lenin the concept of ‘transformation’ which is typical of every gradualist conception. Progressing further in mystification, Colletti forgets that the fundamental ‘limit’ of the French popular front which he recalls was the fact that it did not even raise the perspective of breaking the framework of the system; the fact that it consisted, in reality, of a coalition of the workers’ parties with the then majority party of the bourgeoisie. As far as this last aspect is concerned, the difference with respect to the Chilean experience is manifest; for after a certain point, as the dynamic of the class struggle sharpened, the Popular Unity based itself ever more exclusively on the working-class parties and came up against the opposition of the entire bourgeoisie. But precisely because of its reformist conception—which Allende pursued with a consistency which, given the way in which he fell, we could even define as heroic—the Popular Unity never challenged either the fundamental mechanism of capitalist accumulation nor the traditional political structures nor the State apparatus in its essential articulations. Therefore—given that it was operating in a highly explosive context and could not escape a powerful pressure from below—it revealed its own contradictions all the more dramatically. It objectively stimulated an impetuous mobilization of the masses, but without giving them the necessary outlet, without organizing or structuring the movement, without ensuring that they had the indispensable instruments of [illegible] the pre-existing economic balance, but it was not capable of providing the bourgeoisie—with whom it nevertheless wished to keep a dialogue going—with the guarantees which the latter demanded. Thus it could not avoid a situation of persistent conflict and a tendency to paralysis. Yet—given its premises—it could not and would not construct an alternative mechanism of accumulation.
In such a context, a head-on collision was inevitable. The bourgeoisie was driven to one by the logic of its defence of its vital interests. And it made this choice not because Allende's mass base was narrowing, but for the diametrically opposite reason. Certainly, Allende was finding it increasingly difficult to keep control of ever greater sectors of the proletariat who, far from moving to the right, were breaking in practice with the reformist approach (Colletti is wrong in his evaluation of the El Teniente strike which, after an initial confused phase, was only [illegible]). [illegible] The truth is that the bourgeois leaders had come to realize that they could not win the game by progressively eroding the base of the Popular Unity régime (as, for a whole period, they had thought they would be able to do). The March elections were in this sense the alarm bell: today we know from statements made by spokesmen for the Junta that it was precisely after the elections that the military chiefs began to plan for the coup. The mobilizations which, from the end of June on, led to the occupation of hundreds of factories and to the first steps in arming the workers did the rest. Unfortunately, the bourgeoisie showed itself to be far more aware than the reformist bureaucracy (and than certain Marxist intellectuals) of the inevitability of a head-on clash, when an explosive social and political situation of such a kind is created, and of the need for a break, a qualitative leap. For this reason, when the inevitable outcome was reached, the bourgeoisie had made its preparations (utilizing the army as its irreplaceable instrument), whereas the working class was either unprepared or at best only marginally prepared.
This is the lesson of Chile, and it is a crime to try to obscure it with evasive arguments, with incorrect analyses, with mystifying ‘historical’ references. It is still worse if, as Colletti does, one puts forward nothing in its place except a generic pessimism or an implicit support for the basic positions of the strategy of the Communist parties. And it is still worse again if one attributes to Marx and to Lenin the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat ‘presupposed 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’. Colletti has spent a decade or two in minute study of the texts: how is it possible for him now to confound the revolutionary spirit of the historical analysis and the political project of Marx and Lenin with the evolutionist pedantry of Kautsky?
Lucio Colletti is the most important contemporary Italian [illegible], [illegible] from 1950 [illegible] was editor of the independent Marxist monthly La Sinistra. After the publication of Livio Maitan’s book Party, Army and Masses in the Chinese Crisis in 1969, Colletti spoke with Maitan at a number of public meetings, defending Maitan’s critical and Marxist analysis of the Cultural Revolution against the apologetic attitude to the Chinese bureaucracy which predominates on the Italian far left. He is also the author of an extremely useful article ‘The Question of Stalin’ (NLR No. 61, reproduced in pamphlet form and available from Red Books).
[Enrico Berlinguer is the general secretary of the Italian Com]munist Party; Romano Ledda a Party intellectual who as editor of its theoretical journal Critica Marxista from 1963 to 1966 pursued a relatively ‘open’ policy.