Guzmán and company are interested in something unwieldy here. It's a topic only broached once or twice directly, but one that structures the entire arc of the worker uprising. What role do workers play in changing a capitalist government to a socialist one? Is it enough to simply follow the orders of a reformist government, or do the workers bear a personality responsibility as well? In the case of Chile, the workers are forced to play their hand. The first half of the film gives us preliminary measures in counteracting the opposition's sabotage. Workers arrange transportation for each other and for resources when private companies refuse to cooperate. They take ownership of the factories when the bosses abandon them and make plans of their own for continuing production. Food is rationed out at stalls according to ration cards given out to families. We know from the last two films that political turmoil rages outside these communal sites, but Guzmán rarely gives us a glimpse of the outside world. Instead we watch as the workers slowly, imperceptibly even, begin to feel a larger stake in ensuring the success of socialism. Survival and maintenance evolve into activism, and soon the workers are questioning if they are now the true agents of change in this messy transition.
Again, for Chile, this is almost inevitable. As one speaker notes in an argument for worker autonomy, the government only has a 44% share of the parliamentary process. A 60% majority is impossible. The workers cannot reasonably expect government assistance as the nationalization program spurs the opposition on to greater and deadlier acts of protest. Through narration we know that the truckers' strike has the financial support of the United States. So it makes sense that the workers would take note of this state of affairs and mount their own defense against socialist collapse. But somewhere along the line, the social dynamic shifts. The workers retain faith in Allende and Popular Unity even as they increasingly feel the need to take matters into their own hands. They support Allende by supporting themselves and each other. The emergency measures solidify into business as usual, and once the workers declare their grassroots independence and establish a degree of autonomy, the momentum keeps on building.
And to all appearances, this seems to work. It seems almost beside the point to ask whether or not leftist intellectuals should question this kind of worker mobilization. Allende was responsible for the nationalization mandate, and top-down policies are an effective way of converting popular will into real, broad-ranging change. We can, with hindsight, see that it was the middlemen who blocked Allende's initiatives from truly changing the nature of business in Chile. And yet here are the workers, straining and nearly succeeding to meet Allende halfway as their management abdicates responsibility for a smooth transition. One wonders what might have happened if the opposition weren't so violent in its resistance. If the bureaucrats had simply backed off and waited out the reforms, they might have been surprised to see an economy adapting to their absence.
It would never have been simple, of course. The scarcity of food and supplies, along with 16-hour work days, should do well to cut short any romanticizing of the Chilean workers' struggles. Disagreements spring up from questions of management and process, ones that maybe not every worker or union is equipped to handle. It's no easy task to pool the efforts of all kinds of people and direct them toward a common goal. Still, the sense of competence remains. When confronted with problems, the workers seem quite capable of handling them on their own. Their collective understanding of the factory gives them the confidence to move from day-laborers to active participants in the organization's welfare. Together they're able to diagnose the problems and work toward breaking what they call the "capitalist structures" of their labor organization with little need for outside help. The filmmakers themselves seem surprised that the Christian Democrat workers hold no special loyalty to their party (illustrated amusingly when an interviewer asks a man twice where his loyalties lie and is told "with the workers" despite his presumable Christian Democrat affiliation). There is little external reward for this group unity in the moment, and all this complexity is exactly what administrators would argue people need bureaucratic leadership to handle for them. Through observation and interview, Guzmán cannily provides us with a different notion. People, the film suggests, only need to feel their time and effort are being valued and leading to a greater good.
One gets the sense that this engine of determination is what libertarians seek to activate when they attempt to rally individuals into taking charge of their own destinies. But I suspect they're vastly underestimating the mutually reinforcing power of group collaborators. Individualist paranoia of cooperation (or 'groupthink,' as they'd have it) seems to have dissuaded libertarians that any meaningful change can happen between people, that change only comes from among them. If enough individuals believe the same thing, the legend seems to go, they can each demand it on their own and prevent outsiders from influencing their opinions. To me, this seems more like groupthink than discussion, debate, and agreement among disparate groups do. I believe empathy and understanding (broadly speaking) are what enable us to grasp what benefits the larger public as a whole rather than just you and me and some like-minded friends. There's mutual reinforcement among libertarians too, but it takes the form of encouraging indiscriminate skepticism and delusional self-reliance. The reactionary thought process can be easily stimulated and distorted by exaggerated threats to selfhood, but an educated, motivated group's resilience not only resists psychic sabotage, it also sustains its own energy. The libertarian's raging belief in the power of the self is a sustained high quickly followed by the low of realizing how little a difference one individual can make. The solution is not to provoke many other individuals into thinking and feeling as you do, but to gather people and rely on their innate desire to help each other. This way, one individual's failure or doubt doesn't diminish the strength of the group. The group contains the goodwill of all involved, and it is more than the sum of its parts. Libertarianism can only ever be the sum of its parts, and when the pressure of massive social/political/economic change gets to be too much for any one participant, as it undoubtedly will, the individual will flounder and submit to despair, lost without the support of caring others that gently persuades people to keep trying against all outside odds.
We can see this at work in socialist Chile, and I suspect the opposition's campaign was built on stoking individualist fears of loss and uncertainty in more prosperous Chileans. This is actually quite an effective tactic, in contrast to libertarian grassroots change, because existential uncertainty in the privileged is a motivator all its own (and because resisting change is always easier than creating it). Agitate that dread, reveal it in the faces of your compatriots, build up a roving, faceless crowd of scapegoats and group action all but prompts itself. The hysteria of the bourgeois is a defense against the pragmatism of the workers, and screaming and lashing out through violence are the tactics of a campaign of intimidation. Spread enough chaos this way and you will eventually enable a Pinochet to gather up weapons, launch an offensive and restore 'order.' The bourgeoisie doesn't actually have to do anything but embrace and project its fear long enough for someone to notice and take action into their own hands. Uncharitably, this is little more than the wailing of a baby when it craves attention and entertainment. When this attitude exists in a sizable majority of adults with a sizable amount of power, though, the implications are far graver.
And so Chile fails to implement its socialist imperative, and it is punished for 17 brutal years afterward. This could be viewed as a warning against any similar sort of actions (the US certainly intended for it to be, and conservatives would be glad to remind you), but Guzmán wisely picks out the beginnings of a true revolution stirring just beneath the chaos into which his country was thrown. Detailing the Pinochet administration's descent into bloodthirsty dictatorship would only remind us of the consequences of daring to hope for a better life, but Guzmán has not given us that story. Instead, he shows us how beautifully proactive people can be when they fight against the inertia of capitalism. Salvador Allende may have failed to change Chile singlehandedly, but it was never his battle to fight alone. He always had the people there to support him. They are the ones who sacrificed their comfort, their security, and their safety to push their country forward. They took charge when the government was selfishly handicapped and kept the socialist dream alive. And they were the ones who stood to lose the most if the opposition rose up and cracked down, as it did, but they knew it was worth the risk. Allende may be the man on the platform, but it was the anonymous men and women of the cheering crowds that brought Chile closer than most countries have ever been to true equality. To Patricio Guzmán and company: for remembering them, and for showing us their power, we are most grateful.(photo credit: www.patricioguzman.com)
