Régis Debray’s The Chilean Revolution consists of 68 pages of “conversations with Allende” (January, 1971) padded out to book length by a long introduction by Debray, 29 pages of appended notes, and Allende’s “postscript” which turns out to be his first official message to Congress (May, 1971).
The reader might reasonably expect much of an encounter between Debray, the Marxist intellectual and revolutionary theorist only a month earlier released from a Bolivian prison to which he had been sentenced for thirty years for his associations with Ché Guevara, and Allende, a Marxist revolutionary pragmatic politician, then in office for less than two months. Unfortunately the actual recorded conversations are so exceedingly friendly, cliché-ridden, and gossipy that they seldom go beyond a rather perfunctory analysis of the Chilean situation.
Despite a turgid style (no fault of the translator since the original is, if anything, more awkward), a crucial theme emerges from Debray’s introduction, which in fact he repeatedly carries over into his interview with Allende. Debray questions whether the Unidad Popular can effectively hand over to the working class power over their own lives, the political and economic institutions which lead to a socialist society, as long as the Unidad Popular continues to work within the same legal and legalistic frameworks which in the past served the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie and the foreign capitalists. This fundamental revolutionary question, however, is so insisted upon by Debray that many concrete elements of current Unidad Popular tactics and strategy are not adequately questioned and explored. While Debray’s treatment of the history of Chile is good to very good as far as it goes (despite some telling inaccuracies) he omits much that is essential. Surprisingly he almost overlooks the deep penetration of foreign capitalism into the economic, political, and social Chilean reality. Nor does Debray attempt to explain the early strength and radical tendencies of the Chilean labor movement (unfortunately all too unusual in dependent capitalist societies). Debray also makes no references to other works on Chile and gives no bibliography; the publisher includes no index to sort out the issues in this disparate book.
Chilean specialists will certainly want to read The Chilean Revolution. It is not even without some information, human interest, and relevant analysis for the general reader, including the undergraduate student. Yet a work such as NACLA’s New Chile is unquestionably a better introduction to the Chilean “revolution” from a radical point of view.
