those in the Socialist Party, talks between Popular Unity and the Christian Democrats started up again for the OLIC Whilst the government was consolidating the working class was on Cerrillos-Maipu, an industrial area of Santiago, were the first to resist the attempts of Popular Unity to put a In July 1972 they capitalist of the leauersmos or lne who had Two the legal rules.
The As a result of Popular support the could to as the governworkers' inflation. It also The general lockout had failed to bring the country to a standstill. The strike had shown the • workers tal they could run the country without the bosses and as a result the anticonsciousness of the workers grew. Cordones industriales and other embryo forms of workers' power sprang up around the countr and rudimentary forms of workers militias began to take shape.
But the political faintheartedness government, especially the Communist and Socialist Parties, kept allowing the ruling class to recompose its forces, even after they had been pushed back by the mass movement.
formidable social blocs prepared their forces for a life and death struggle. In that struggle the ruling class was prepared to break all It was prepared to fight to the last gasp for its interests.
working class was less for tunate. Its leaders trusted in capitalist law and order and expected the armed forces and the police to maintain it the peacful road led cemetery for the workers' movement.
military coup destroyed the Unity government. workers and militants in particular suffered death and torture because their leaders had done everything they appease the bourgeoisie rather than fight them.
It is ironic that these "practical' reformists accuse us Marxists of utopianism. You only have to look at the scale of their defeat and the sufferings that defeat inflicted on the Chilean people to make your own judgement.