Chile - March 12th, 2020

After the enormous mass action on March 8...

The trade union bureaucracy of “Social Unity” betrayed the March 9 strike
to keep supporting Piñera and drive the people to the fraudulent referendum

On Sunday March 8, the entire Chile witnessed a magnificent action in the streets for the International Women Worker’s Day. About two million in Santiago and hundreds of thousands across the country marched to the cry of: “Piñera is a murderer just like Pinochet!”. It was a huge militant action, led by women workers and oppressed women. Along with them, the workers, the rebel youth and the exploited took to the streets.
This new mass political action proved once again all the willingness of the workers movement and the exploited to continue their revolutionary fight to overthrow the Piñera Government and the regime of the 1980 Constitution, servants of imperialism.
But this huge struggle energy was not able to be successfully expressed the day after, on Monday March 9, when a national strike was called by the leadership of the feminist movement and the organizations of Social Unity.

There were plenty of reasons for March 9 to be the beginning of the indefinite revolutionary general strike until Piñera, the Pinochet regime and its fraudulent referendum fall. But that day only some ultra-minority sectors of teachers, state and health workers could go on strike, along with the secondary students that massively left the schools to take part in this struggle action. The mines, the ports, the factories and the vast majority of workplaces did not stop working because the union and student bureaucracies of Social Unity betrayed the strike they were forced to call.
These leaderships, with the excuse that it was only a "women's strike", prevented it from being a working class strike to kick Piñera out, when that was the only way that the fair demands of women workers can be conquered. They manipulated the struggle of oppressed women against the workers’ movement, telling them not to stop. Thus, on Monday March 9, the exploited women were left alone fighting against the government, when they had been fighting side by side with the rest of the exploited in this revolutionary combat since October.
The union and student bureaucracies once again divided the ranks of the working class and the exploited. They took out of the picture the worker movement and separated the exploited women from the rebel youth of the "first line" and of the oppressed masses in struggle. Thus, they prevented the revolutionary general strike to develop. Thus, they continued saving the Piñera government and continued driving the working class and the people into the trap of the April referendum.
As if this were not enough, these bureaucrats called two days later, on March 11, two years after Piñera took office as president, to a ridiculous strike of 11 minutes! A mockery on behalf of these traitors.
These bureaucrats know very well that if a revolutionary general strike, such as those that took place in October and November, takes place again, Piñera's hours would be numbered. The exploiters do not forget the panic they had when we paralyzed 24 ports, when the workers in the main mines of the country, such as La Escondida or Chuquicamata, etc. went on strike, as part of the great independent actions of the masses that shocked Chile since October 18.

That is why these leaderships swore to the bourgeoisie that they would play their full role so that the labor movement never intervenes again and since December they have been betraying the road to the general strike. They are conscious that if the working class had led the combat of the masses, paralyzing production and attacking capitalists and imperialism on their profits and property, Piñera and the Pinochetist regime would have fallen.
This is the scenario that the bureaucracies of Social Unity are preventing, along with the former Concertación, the Broad Front and the "Red Pacos" of the CP. They are the ones who support Piñera and the Pinochetist generals for them to keep the power they lost in the streets at the hands of the revolutionary mass uprising. That is why they have put all their forces to impose this bogus referendum (now also supported by the renegades of Trotskyism such as the PTR), where what is “approved” is that Piñera continues and he ends his 4-year term.

 

ENOUGH WITH THE CLASS-COLLABORATIONIST TRADE UNIONS AND STUDENTS BUREAUCRACIES!

OUT WITH PIÑERA AND THE PINOCHETIST REGIME!
DOWN WITH THE TRAP OF THE “CONSTITUENT REFERENDUM”!

By the actions of these treacherous leaderships, today the heroic Chilean revolution that began on October 18, as part of the revolutionary combats in Ecuador, Iraq or France, has entered a real crossroads.
With this enormous betrayal to the March 9 general strike, they are playing the role of finishing driving the masses into the deadly trap of the April referendum.
With their promises of “constituent referendums” and “peace”, the bourgeoisie wants to put back to sleep the Chile that woke up, which means that the exploited leave the streets and so the attacks on the most hardened sectors of workers and youth are deepened. With their “democratic detours” such as the referendum, they are preparing the conditions to make a blooshed in Chile again, as in 1973, or as they just did in Bolivia with the massacre of the workers and poor peasants in Senkata last November.
The class-collaborationist leaderships are at the service of this. They are seeking the great masses to give up the combat in order to go to vote for the “I Approve” and separate them from the militant vanguard that is being harshly suppressed by the murderous pacos, with new martyrs, wounded, mutilated, imprisoned and with a brutal persecution of the fighters of the “first line”.
This is the plan that the United States, the West Point generals and the commanders of the Latin American armies decided in order to defeat the ongoing revolutionary processes, strengthening the “peaceful” leaderships, such as those of Social Unity, to provide a way out that makes the bourgeois stay in power, such as the April referendum, and attacking those they call “violent” with iron and blood.

We already saw on March 11 how the murderous police let the “peaceful” union bureaucracy and the CP to march in front of La Moneda, while they repressed the vanguard fighters, “the violent ones” who refuse to leave the streets. It is clear that the more the masses go to the vote to the referendum the more the vanguard is isolated from the combat of the people of Chile, such as the rebel youth. To finish disciplining them, the “red pacos” of the CP are getting ready, as the fifth column of the bosses, marching through La Alameda.
We can't allow it! With these leaderships we cannot fight! Do not let anyone steal our fight!

From the factories, mines, ports, workplaces, high schools, universities and self-convened assemblies of the populations, let's set up workers and popular committees for the boycott of the fraudulent referendum of Piñera, the generals, the former Concertation and the CP to bring down Piñera and the Pinochetist regime with the revolutionary general strike!
Against the undemocratic trap of the referendum: for a free and sovereign Revolutionary Constituent Assembly, without Piñera, without genocidal soldiers, without murderous pacos, without corrupt politicians, without imperialist transnationals and without traitorous bureaucrats.

The working class must set up the “first line” in all the mines, ports and factories in the country! Open the road to the rank and file assemblies, the factory committees and the strike picket lines!
We must coordinate the centralized self-defense committees, along the “first lines”, and conquer the workers and popular militia! For rank and file soldiers' committees that break with the armed forces officers to prevent them from massacring the people again, to elect their leaders democratically and organize together with the fighting masses!

Let's set up the power of those from below! For a National Congress of rank and file delegates from the entire worker movement, the militant students, the poor peasants and the exploited in struggle!

We have to expropriate without compensation and place under workers’ control the imperialist banks and transnational corporations! The copper should be for the Chileans so that there is free education for the worker’s children! Land for the poor peasants! Decent work, wages and pensions for all!

Revolutionary provisional government of workers and poor peasants!
Chile will be socialist or a Wall Street colony!

 

POI-CI of Chile, member of the FLTI