Avoiding The Coup

The 1000 days of the Popular Unity (broad front, unity-in-action) government in Chile was brought to an end with a military assault by Chile’s military on its own motherland on September 11th, 1973. The criminality of the Pinochet coup is not in doubt. What is more fruitful for our study is the question of why it was possible for this to happen? Or to take the matter a little further: Could it happen here? Volodia Teitelboim was a member of the Central Committee of the Chilean Communist Party who was abroad at the time of the coup and so escaped the brutalities. Hence Teitelboim was able to bear witness to what had been done and what mistakes and omissions there were in the Chilean revolution under the late Salvador Allende. Read about it in the document linked below. YCL National Secretary Cde Buti Manamela long ago promised to open the session on this text, which will take place on Friday, November 3rd. In South Africa the preparations for a coup (but by stealth, and not direct force of arms in the first place) have been taking place in front of our eyes, for example in the resistible rise of Penuell Maduna. Many of the events in that process have been clearly traced by Ranjeni Munusamy in her article from last Friday’s Mail and Guardian, linked below (downloaded from the Friends of JZ site). That coup could still happen, but it looks less likely than before, because of the determination and persistence of people like Ranjeni. Patrick Laurence flirts with the idea of a right-wing reaction in his article for the liberal Helen Suzman Foundation’s magazine, FOCUS. Read it (linked below) for the understanding it gives of how the other side thinks. How many of our “liberals” would stand up against a right-wing putsch, if it was dressed up as a way of dealing with the communists? Buti Manamela does not mince words. See his speaking notes on credit amnesty, linked below, which is actually a tribute from the YCL to the ANC Youth League for its long and proud history. His bottom-line concern is jobs. Renee Grawitzky unpacks some of the miserable logic of capitalism to expose the fact that there are no effective plans to deal with unemployment in South Africa. There are no plans for raising human needs to the higher level of culture that would provide the work for today's unemployed. This concept of raising the level of need is another one that needs rescuing from the neo-liberal bonfire. Blaming the situation on “lack of skills” is blaming the victim. In any case it is not the supply side, but the demand side of the economy that requires remedying. Why is demand (not utilitarian demand but imaginative demand, i.e. the “free development of each”) not expressed in such a way as to insist on satisfaction in our society? Demand is a moral question! The right is on the side of the receiver, and not with the supposed “deliverer”. Demand is by necessity that which defines what is right. Demand cannot be left to superstitious belief in a "hidden hand", or treated using a trite concept of petty-bourgeois housekeeping. Click on these links: 1977, Teitelboim, Popular Unity Rule in Chile (5158 words) Not where you fell, where you slipped, Ranjeni Munusamy, M and G (1999 words) Scrambled Egg, HSF Focus 43, Patrick Laurence (2223 words) YCLSA Nat Sec Buti Manamela on once-off credit amnesty (702 words) New jobs unlikely to reduce poverty, Renee Grawitzky, B Rep (1081 words)