Re: Chile's Pinochet

 Paulo Roberto de Almeida states that the leftist militants who were repressed in Pinochet's Chile 'were true socialists or communists, thus adepts of a soviet style version of command economy'. 

I'm afraid this is a stereotype. True, President Allende's Unidad Popular government had a strong aversion to the 'anarchy of the market', but they had no place for a planned economy either. The result was chaos. Many firms were nationalized and no longer subject to the discipline of the market. Mounting losses were financed by loans from the central bank that nobody ever thought of repaying, contributing to rampant inflation. Now President Allende, whose Unidad Popular government had no majority in Parliament, did not want to alienate the middle classes,including owners of small and medium-sized enterprises, but revolutionary groups to the left of the government nevertheless took over these firms, with the help of the workers. It is characteristic for the situation that the Communists, along with the small Partido Radical, tried to hand these firms back to their owners. The Communists were in favour of a nationalist revolution, which should include the nationalization of the 'monopolies', but thought the time not ripe for a socialist revolution with full-scale nationalization. The great Soviet-economy scholar Alec Nove noted, when visiting Chile in 1972, that students mocked the Partido Communista, calling it a bourgeois party.(1) true, the leading Socialist Party was largely in favour of large-scale nationalization, but had no intention (nor the power) to impose five-year plans on the economy. 

Rather than as 'adepts of a soviet style version of command economy', the socialists and communists in Allende's Chile can perhaps better be seen as a variant of the New Left as anayzed by Assar Lindbeck, combining an aversion to the market to a preference for decentralization, with the anarachy of neither market nor plan as a result.(2)

Hans Visser



(1) Alec Nove, 'The Political Economy of the Allende Regime', in Ph. J. O'Brien (red.), Allende's Chile,Praeger, New York 1976.
(2) Assar Lindbeck, The Political Economy of the New Left, Harper & Row, New York 1971.