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Marta Harnecker (1937-2019) was a Chilean journalist and Marxist intellectual. Active during Salvador Allende's government in Chile, Harnecker also advised the government of Cuba and Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez.  

For issue #87 of The Internationalist, we translate her volume, Estrategia y Táctica or Strategy and Tactics, co-written with Gabriela Uribe in 1973. This text was part of the volumes written by Harnecker and Uribe to promote socialist education.

In this section, Harnecker and Uribe explain how Allende's Popular Unity aims to target imperialism, large landowners, and monopoly capitalists, despite internal disagreements on tactics and enemy prioritization.

This text has been translated from Spanish to English by Maria Inés Cuervo, Translations Coordinator at the Progressive International.

In Chile, revolutionary political groups are determined to win the war against dependent capitalism in order to build a socialist regime in our country.

But this war is difficult: the enemies are very powerful. In spite of being a tiny minority, they had, before the triumph of the Popular Government, immense economic power: they owned the factories, the estates, the banks, the commercial houses. 

With political power, based fundamentally on their control of the State apparatus: mainly the Executive, the Legislative and Judicial Branches and the Armed Forces, in addition to the enormous administrative apparatus made up of an army of State employees, who managed to get jobs thanks to their contacts with the hitherto dominant classes. With ideological power, being the owners of most of the mass media: radios, newspapers, magazines, and controlling an important part of the television programs, besides determining to a great extent the content of education in its different levels.

On the other hand, although the majority of the people demanded drastic changes, as indicated by the vote achieved by the candidatures of Allende and Tomic (63%), only a little more than a third of the population was able to pronounce itself in favour of a program that sought to initiate the construction of socialism in our country.

Taking into account this correlation of forces and determining on what terrain the struggle should take place in order to advance towards the creation of a new correlation of forces, the proletarian parties of the Popular Unity proposed: 

1) the need to give battle on the electoral terrain and within the frameworks of bourgeois legality, and

 2) the need to define very well within the enemy front which was the main enemy so that, once defeated, it would be possible to continue advancing along the road of the construction of socialism.

Thus, the following were defined as the main enemies: 

a) Imperialism, owner until then of most of our basic wealth. Its copper mines produced 83% of the copper in 1967 and in fifty years of domination took in profits the equivalent of all the assets of Chile. In addition, through their investments, they controlled important sectors of industry, commerce, transport and energy.

b) The large landowners, owners of most of the land. Farms with more than 80 hectares of basic irrigation were only 2% of all agricultural properties, yet they constituted 55% of the land.

c) The large industrial and banking monopoly capitalists. According to data from 1967, of the 30,500 industries that existed in the country, only about 150 monopolised control of all markets. They also concentrated State aid, bank credit and exploited the rest of the country's industrial entrepreneurs by selling them expensive raw materials and buying their products cheaply.

It was thus, taking into account these considerations, that the Program of Popular Unity was drawn up, a program that sets out the nature of the immediate struggle that the popular forces must wage to advance towards the construction of socialism.

The Program of the UP defines, therefore, a partial strategic objective, to create the conditions to advance towards the final strategic objective: to establish socialism in our country. 

It is a war, an uninterrupted process, but within which there must be various combats to defeat the enemy: the first great combat is the one proposed by the Program of Popular Unity.

Not all sectors inside and outside the UP agreed that the correct terrain in which the first combat should take place was the electoral terrain and the carrying out of tasks within the framework of bourgeois legality. There were those who then put forward the alternative of the vote or the gun and those who called for electoral abstention. Most of them have been recognizing their errors in this matter.

On the other hand, there was also no initial agreement on the designation of the main enemy: there were those who, simplistically applying the scheme of exploiters and exploited, were not able to recognize the secondary contradictions that could occur within the ruling classes. They argued that the enemy of the moment was the entire industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie and, consequently, they favoured the seizure of industries and small estates.

For the proletarian parties of the Popular Unity, on the contrary, the only viable road, the only road that in those given conditions allowed to advance towards socialism, was the defeat of imperialism, the latifundists and the monopolistic bourgeoisie. The defeat of these enemies means in fact the breaking of the backbone of capitalism at the national level, and, as the development of a non-monopolistic capitalist system is not possible in Chile in our epoch, the only possible alternative is socialism. Defeating this enemy creates, therefore, the conditions that allow us to advance towards the conquest of the final strategic objective.

There is no doubt that the ideal would be to put an immediate end to all exploitation, i.e. to liberate all areas at the same time, and that if we had a favourable correlation of forces (with all the people armed because of a recent war against our neighbours, as was the case in Russia, for example), we would choose that path without hesitation.

But the reality is very different: we do not currently have a favourable correlation of forces to follow that path, the enemies are still very powerful and we still have to win over many sections of the people.

And we know that if the ideal does not correspond to the reality of the forces at our disposal, trying to achieve it at all costs becomes, in the end, the main obstacle to achieving it. If, on the other hand, a sector of the enemy is attacked first and certain strategic areas are liberated, it is easier to move on from there to liberate the rest of the territory.

But it is important to clarify that this does not mean, as some think, that it is necessary to demobilise non-strategic areas so that they can wait with arms folded for the final liberation. On the contrary, these zones must be mobilised, but their actions must be coordinated and subordinate to the main objective. Thus, for example, we know that the medium and small capitalists are not our main enemies, that therefore their industries are not strategic zones, and that the UP Programme does not propose their incorporation into the social area. However, this does not mean that the workers of these enterprises should stop their struggles, stop mobilising. On the contrary, they should be integrated into the process by setting up committees to monitor and defend production with the aim of ensuring, through their pressure, that these capitalists work in accordance with the production plans programmed by the government. 

From these unliberated zones, the popular forces must support the struggle for the liberation of the strategic zones, since this is the road that will allow them to become liberated zones in the future.

In short, the fulfilment of the Programme of Popular Unity makes it possible to achieve the partial strategic objective, which opens the way to the conquest of the final strategic objective: socialism.

The programme is fulfilled by means of of various tactical steps. These are the concrete ways in which, according to the correlation of forces, progress is made towards the strategic objective set.

Thus, for example, one tactical step was the UP's commitment to the DC to support Allende's election to Congress. Another tactical step was the decision not to conciliate with the copper overseers. Tactical steps were also taken when choosing the pace of the expropriations: they were numerous and rapid at the beginning, taking advantage of the fact that the enemies were disconcerted, a situation that has changed since then.

In deciding on tactical steps, one must have great flexibility: one must be ready to change tactics according to changes in reality, but one must always try to ensure that one's actions bring one closer to, not further away from, one's strategic objectives.

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