In 1970, Salvador Allende was democratically elected as the first socialist president of Chile. That very same year, Fidel Castro paid him a visit.
What was supposed to be a jubilant meeting between two socialist leaders quickly gave rise to a stark, dark warning from Castro.
Against the backtrop of euphoric people’s celebrations in Santiago, a concerted fascist backlash was being prepared by opposition parties, rogue elements of the military and the CIA. Having analyzed the situation, Castro gave his assessment to Allende:
“If you don't get these people under control, the revolution is not going to succeed. We were never up against anything like this in Cuba”
Castro went on to say that unwillingness to use state violence against these elements would ensure the collapse of Allende’s project. But as Vincent Bevins noted in his famed book The Jakarta Method, Allende and his Unidad Popular party remained committed to democratic socialism.
Allende barely weathered a couple of years of assassination attempts, failed coups and executions of his advisers when, in 1973, a massive, violent and ultimately successful final coup was launched in Santiago.
Allende barricated himself in the presidential palace and delivered his final words to the Chilean people:
Surely, this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes. My words do not have bitterness but disappointment…
At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector who today are hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.
Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, great avenues will again open, through which will pass the free man, to construct a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.
And then, it was gone. When Allende finally understood Castro’s point, it was too late. Decades of Pinochet’s gory, genocidal and maniacal fascism terrorized Chile.
The suffocation of a socialism besieged by imperialism and foreign coup plotters has contributed to the historical necessity of authority and might to counter it.
The Marxist theory of the falling rate of profit presupposes the following: When capitalists compete they eventually undercut each other, trimming their profit margins slimmer and slimmer. When this process is taken to its limit, the market, say, the imperial British one, or the current American one, is fully exploited and there is no more profit to be made.
To counter the falling rate of profit, capitalists will have to export capital to the periphery, the Global South, in order to extract more surplus value to counter the tendency. This allows the imperial core to monopolize capital, to reach the highest stage of capitalism.
To get there, they often promote violence against underdeveloped countries in order to dispossess their workers land, resources, and assets to be privatized by the ruling class in order to counter the falling rate of profits at home.
This is a study done by Marxist economists, and it looked at net primary income flows (cross border flows of profit, interest, and rent) to gauge who extracts the greatest surplus value from foreign countries. Consider the massive difference between the US and its allies, even small countries like Sweden, compared with large non-Western countries like Russia and China. This is the primary difference between the imperial core and the rest of the world.
Countries who then rise up to a socialist promise and reject attempts to subjugate them as client states, are then besieged: Either through actual war, and even more often through information war, propaganda, infiltration and the use of the domestic opposition to overthrow governments.
This perspective is almost never mentioned or even entertained when Western neocons/liberals deride China for their internet firewall or North Korea for their ban on all American entertainment.
Nor is this mentioned when discussing why the Bolsheviks developed a siege mentality, and why it lead them to a commitment to lockstep party unity and a heavy security apparatus. The Soviet Union never saw a period of national unity, stability and economic development as they did under Josef Stalin. But when post-Stalin revisionists went on to liberalize the USSR, both economically and security wise, and scale down its internal discipline and alertness, a process accelerated by Gorbachev, the union collapsed.
This Machiavellian approach to state politics is doubly true for socialist projects: After a change of government, there must be punishment of those who are enemies of the present state of affairs. He who creates a tyranny and does not kill Brutus, and he who establishes a free state and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will not last long.
This, of course, is not a positive good but an unfortunate and sad reality for any state, country or people who declare their land, assets and resources off-limits to Washington DC, Brussel and London.
As long as international politics itself remains a proxy for capitalists to pursue their imperial solutions to the falling rate of profit, there will only be two types of socialists projects: Those who meet the imperial core with the tenacity and stubborness of Fidel Castro or those who meet it with child-like naivity of Salvador Allende.
Perfect description of the necessity for a proletarian dictatorship. Thanks!