This book is a useful antidote to the dogmatic and ill-informed diatribes which portray the Chilean working class as merely involved in economic struggles or as helpless spectators in the conflict between the Allende government and the right-wing opposition. Raptis traces the rise of workers’ councils in the factories, of community councils in the barrios, and of neighborhood food-distribution committees, which resisted the black-marketeering and hoarding of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie. Raptis’ discussion of the massive growth of popular democratic power during the Allende period provides us with a clue to the terroristic practices of the military regime which followed: the butchery was perceived by the military regime and its U.S. and Chilean supporters as the only way to restore the prerogatives of the capitalist class, as well as the only way to put the workers back in their place, i.e., as docile objects of exploitation. Raptis includes an accurate account of the conflicts between the Allende government supported by the Communist Party which attempted to restrain the process within the framework of bourgeois legality and the burgeoning self-management movement which sought to establish a new, more representative, political framework of direct popular rule.
The last section of the book contains a series of documents, interviews, and notes published in Chile dealing with self-management and communal councils.
Despite its useful account, the book lacks depth. The development of class consciousness is not described as an historical process. The struggles and circumstances which created a working class culture through the traditional left-wing organizations are scantly discussed (and not infrequently distorted). All that we are presented is a picture of the advanced forms, i.e., workers’ councils. Notions of workers’ “instincts” and “spontaneity” hardly explain social behavior. More to the point is the fact that Socialist and Communist workers applied ideas learned from, but not always practiced by, their leaders. And it is this complex interaction between leaders and ‘bases’ that Raptis does not capture and which weakens his account of the tragedy of the Allende period. Raptis underestimates the importance of the diffuse socialist consciousness and loyalties which the workers’ movement experienced under “reformist” left leaders and focuses on the gradual divergences which only appeared after 1971 under the impact of massive struggles. He thus leaves unexplained why workers who were radicalized beyond their leaders did not abandon the traditional left parties. Raptis places great importance on the issue of self-management and he is correct in judging its central importance in the organization of any socialist society deserving the name. But in the transitional period between capitalist and socialist society, when all the anti-socialist forces from the CIA, through subversive generals to fascist street-fighters, are hurling every imaginable weapon in the way, the limits of self-management become obvious. In itself, self-management was an unstable phenomenon between capitalism and socialist revolution: threatening capitalist prerogatives but not securely anchored within a state structure capable of consolidating the new social power. Hence the limits of self-management as an organizational instrument for taking power: it lacks the centralized organization and militarized component necessary for unifying the fragmented sectoral struggles and taking control of the state. The central issue is how non-democratic forms of representation necessary for a successful transition become transformed into institutions of self-management. In his postmortem, Raptis wavers between calls for revolutionary leadership and more self-management.
