(en) The tasks of social anarchism in Chile by C.A.L.

The "libertarian" world as an area for debate ---- Until a few months ago we had a 
libertarian movement in which different ideological expressions of the popular movement 
came together, but with certain shared elements such as recognition of the need to build 
organizations from the bottom, outside the State, promoting at all times internal 
democracy and the leading role of those directly involved, with the clarity on a strategic 
level that the task was to build popular power with class autonomy and encourage direct 
action as the main political tool for social transformation. However, the appearance of 
the Red Libertaria as part of the Todxs a La Moneda movement which supports the 
presidential candidacy of Marcel Claude and the recent sign from the Frente de Estudiantes 
Libertarios rejecting this initiative have only served to initiate a split within the 
libertarians, where it seems that reformist and authoritarian positions have achieved 
hegemony over part of the militants, and to which anarchists have only stood on as passive 
spectators. [Castellano]


The tasks of social anarchism in Chile

The "libertarian" world as an area for debate


"We by no means deny the importance of political freedom. But political freedom can only 
be obtained when the people are determined to win it; and once it is obtained, it can only 
last and have any sort of value when governments feel that the people will not stand for 
the removal of this freedom. Accustoming the people to delegate to others the conquest and 
defence of their rights is the surest way to leave the way clear to the whims of rulers."
(Malatesta)
"But the real socialist alternative is there, it is not something that is produced outside 
the historical experiences, and with its mistakes and successes, it is the authentic 
product which comprises the desire for justice and freedom of the people. It would be 
important to begin to rethink a more rigorous critique of the things that have shipwrecked 
the alternative to structure a society on bases other than the miserable ones that support 
this system."
(Federaci?n Anarquista Uruguaya)


Until some time ago, and after 14 years of building social anarchism in the Chilean 
region, we could quite happily see the great sympathy with which libertarian ideas were 
being held inside certain sectors of the popular movement. Indeed one could actually talk 
about the existence of a libertarian movement made up of militants from among the unions, 
students and people, who possessed certain more or less shared strategic and tactical 
elements, to which we could add a common political and cultural matrix. The mobilizations 
of 2011 contributed on a subjective level to the libertarian project being able to 
permeate much more deeply into so many of the people involved in those days of struggle.
At the same time, this rapidly-developing libertarian movement rightly understood that it 
was necessary to contribute to building a revolutionary pole within the left, which was 
reflected in joint action with other political experiences within organizations such as 
the student federations and CONFECH [1], the Congress for a new syndicalism and, in an 
embryonic way, in certain neighbourhood assemblies and coordinations that managed to 
survive after 2011. In the last couple of years, this has meant a significant advance for 
anarchists because it allowed an accumulation of favorable forces to take place, and 
allowed anarchist organizations to leave behind their status of "satellite organizations" 
and take on the responsibility of injecting into the popular movement a series of 
experiences and ideas that had been developing within their libertarian programme. As a 
result of this clarity our practices no longer turn away from or reject any initiatives 
that do not originate from us, and at the same time we no longer need to jump on anyone's 
bandwagon, especially that of the authoritarian left.

That was how until a few months ago we had a libertarian movement in which different 
ideological expressions of the popular movement came together, but with certain shared 
elements such as recognition of the need to build organizations from the bottom, outside 
the State, promoting at all times internal democracy and the leading role of those 
directly involved, with the clarity on a strategic level that the task was to build 
popular power with class autonomy and encourage direct action as the main political tool 
for social transformation. However, the appearance of the Red Libertaria [2] as part of 
the Todxs a La Moneda [3] movement which supports the presidential candidacy of Marcel 
Claude and the recent sign from the Frente de Estudiantes Libertarios rejecting this 
initiative have only served to initiate a split within the libertarians, where it seems 
that reformist and authoritarian positions have achieved hegemony over part of the 
militants, and to which anarchists have only stood on as passive spectators. It may be 
perhaps that the Chilean anarchist movement, which at one time was deeply marked by the 
historical line of Creole and Latin American anarchism, has opted for pragmatism to the 
extent that it fully accepts the idea of ??implementing a political line that complements 
institutional struggle from above and mass direct action from below. It may be that the 
commitment to a "democratic rupture" as a way to move towards a popular project of 
majorities, very much part of the logic of the Bolivarian project and that of the 
nationalist left, is a long-term challenge for libertarians. We can say, then, that there 
is still one historical project within the libertarian movement or it may be that we seem 
to be facing a separation of the waters, where two quite distinct (at least at this point, 
in their tactical aspects) projects begin to live together, but also begin to show 
features of deep strategic differences.

Faced with this diagnosis, we anarchists have two options: firstly, to mark ourselves out 
from the "libertarians", meaning that the advance of reformist positions is too much to 
bear, or to think of what is "libertarian" as an area for debate in an attempt to take 
back the historical heritage of the concept, indisputably linked as it is to anarchist 
practices and ideas. To my mind it is time to come together and build a school of thought 
that debates this construction which has been going on for over a decade in which we 
anarchist communists have perhaps had a more important role than other libertarian sectors.

For the time being, silence rules, but ceasing to criticize and remaining alone in this is 
also a mistake. A first major task is to overcome the political weaknesses of anarchism, 
as the Delo Truda group said after the Russian Revolution:

"We have fallen into the habit of ascribing the anarchist movement's failure in Russia in 
1917-1919 to the Bolshevik Party's statist repression, which is a serious error. Bolshevik 
repression hampered the anarchist movement's spread during the revolution, but it was only 
one obstacle. Rather, it was the anarchist movement's own internal ineffectuality which 
was one of the chief causes of that failure, an ineffectuality emanating from the 
vagueness and indecisiveness that characterized its main policy statements on organization 
and tactics."
We must be able to see that the first responsibility is ours. We must be able to learn the 
lessons that must be learnt in order to move forward. We need to return our organizations 
to the idea that the main thing is the role of the grassroots, building from below, but 
above all with class autonomy and mass direct action. In order to neutralize the reformist 
wing, we should begin by clarifying our own programme, our own constructive proposals, and 
promote democracy within our organizational structures. These are issues for which there 
are no magic recipes, though we can be inspired and guided by experience and theoretical 
reflection on our past work.
A second task lies in redefining our policy of alliances, not from the point of view of 
which organizations we intend to build a revolutionary alternative with, but rather to 
define what political positions will prevail in our relationships and from which area they 
should be chosen. That is why our unity with the revolutionary sectors is "from below and 
in the struggle", distancing ourselves from any alliance from above with an institutional 
goal, which is apparently the option being taken by some libertarians converging into 
Todxs a La Moneda. This positioning from below prioritizes coordination in specific areas 
where our various members are actually active (social and socio-political spaces), 
provided that certain minimum objectives are shared. It is in the struggle, because we 
believe it is actual practice which serves to clarify our objectives and correct our 
positions, rather than just debate by political bodies. In this way it is possible to 
build a libertarian pole within the popular sectors that can promote a social project from 
below, with grassroots democracy, as libertarian as possible, that can eventually abolish 
the State in a revolutionary way.

A third task related to the above is to define a clear position on why we oppose the 
participation of libertarians in the current electoral process and this is fully linked to 
our strategy of building from below and outside the State. In the words of Felipe Corr?a:

"Any social transformation of capitalism, as in the case of that advocated by Bakunin, who 
advocated that socialism could only be realized outside of the State institutions, (...) 
would be an organization of all the dominated classes who, starting with their own 
economic and political bodies - unions, social movements, etc. - must carry on both the 
struggle for transformation and the structuring of a new society that does not set itself 
out as a dominating power, but rather as a self-managing power, putting an end to 
domination in general. At the same time we must make it quite clear that although 
short-term victories can be won, both in the economic sphere (higher wages, shorter 
working hours) and in the political (greater freedoms and civil rights), they should be 
only a means to a wider process of transformation, one that is able to forge a 
self-managing power that would eliminate capitalism and the State by forging a new 
territorial and community power structure."
This is where anarchists fall short in providing clarity in the process of revolutionary 
social transformation. It is our political objectives that we have to refine, beyond what 
the doctrine says. This analysis enables reflection on different strategies for change or 
social transformation. In any strategy, it is the objectives that determine the actions, 
i.e. the strategic objectives imply a coherent strategy with it, which unfolds into 
tactics; the tactics should indicate the strategy and the strategy the strategic 
objective. This issue is critical because if the strategic objective is to make 
adjustments within the same model of power, some forms of political participation will 
work more than others; if the goal is the transformation of the model of power relations 
at the macro-social level, other forms of political participation will be more 
appropriate. This is where there are major differences between the two projects that 
coexist within the libertarian movement. We believe at a strategic level that actions 
within the State can promote social change, but social transformation would entail changes 
in the system and not in the current model of power. That does not mean that all 
short-term measures are to the benefit of the current system of domination and tend to 
strengthen the model of dominating power. For example, we agree that in the current 
scenario, Chile needs a series of democratic reforms which must be driven by the popular 
movement as a whole, with the aim of undermining the foundations of the neoliberal model.
One outline of a strategic objective for anarchists and those who within the libertarian 
movement identify with this line of construction would be the strengthening of the 
incipient popular social movement that has been developing the tasks to perform since the 
start of the 2006-11 cycle of struggles. The social movements are, historically, an area 
of the dominated classes which acts on its own behalf. If, on the one hand, short-term 
measures outside the State tend to reinforce their legitimacy and, therefore, the system 
of which it is an essential part, the short-term gains from the class struggle conducted 
by the social movements can serve to strengthen a distinct project of power that opposes 
the current model. Changing the model of power within society by bringing the weight of 
participation to the limits of self-management is an ambitious strategic objective. And in 
order to be consistent with this strategic objective, replacing the system of domination 
with one of self-management requires strategies and tactics that aim for that route. 
Tactics and strategies to strengthen the relations of domination cannot hope to reach 
objectives claiming to seek self-management. The social movements can be privileged areas 
for (revolutionary) social transformation, but their strategies and tactics must be 
adjusted for such purposes. (Correa, 2007)

Social transformations can arise only from everyday construction at the most basic levels 
of society, which is why a good perspective is community control. The self-managed 
organization of the popular social movements, from the perspective of managing the primary 
issues for the life of the organization and for the control of the territory thus becomes 
a key means for the construction of a self-management model. Short-term victories, such as 
democratic reforms for the country, are essential for accumulating the force of the 
dominated classes. But one cannot forget the strategic goal of building popular power with 
class autonomy, which can lay the foundations of self-management and promote a broader 
process of social transformation through concrete gains in various spheres (improved 
economic conditions, greater political participation etc.) and the subjective construction 
of a new cultural ideological ethos within the popular sectors.

This long-term project requires that within the social movements, our essentially 
short-term positions and the corporativist demands of various sectors be left behind us. 
So, leaving behind our short-term objectives and promoting the integration of the social 
movements in favour of a broader objective of transformation becomes the key in this 
process. And if we are to achieve this, it is necessary to have a broader organizational 
structure, articulated into a inter-sectoral popular organization, or a type of "dominated 
class front", which can represent the seeds of social transformation leading towards a 
self-management model of popular power.

BUILD THE POPULAR ORGANIZATION FROM BELOW, OUTSIDE THE STATE
STRUGGLE, CREATE, POPULAR POWER AGAINST THE STATE AND CAPITAL
AGAINST THE CAPITALIST BEAST, ANARCHIST COMMUNIST STRUGGLE
Corriente de Acci?n Libertaria

October 2013.
Translation by FdCA - International Relations Office.


Notes:

1. The Confederation of Chilean Students.
2. "Libertarian Network".
3. "Everyone to La Moneda", political movement created to support the candidacy of Marcel 
Claude in the presidential elections and consisting of Izquierda Unida and the Humanist 
Party. "La Moneda" is the name of the President's residence.