Translation of Declaration by Socialism Revolucionario (CWI Chile) -18/10/2019
The social explosion that has erupted in Chile today was inevitable. It represents the accumulation of too many years of abuse of miserably low salaries which the majority of Chilean workers receive in one of the most expensive countries in the world.
Expensive private education- with youth indebted for life; a public health system which they have destroyed in order to do business with the private health clinics; the AFP (Pensions system) which has robbed us for decades and which in the end resulted in miserably low pensions; companies robbing us with bills for light, water, gas- collusion between the prices charged by pharmacies, supermarkets robbing us -and a very long list of other grievances existed; inevitably in one moment or another all of the anger on these issues would burst out.
The massive greed of the big companies and the capitalists finally has ended with breaking the patience of the people who are sick of such abuses and of accepting the miserable conditions of life which have existed from the era of the dictatorship until today.
Rebellion and civil disobedience is a right that people have when they are being abused and repressed permanently by those who control the state.
The workers must take control
The working class and its trade union organization must give a powerful response and put itself at the head of this movement. Spontaneous struggles are in itself is not enough to provide leadership and organize the struggle to get the results that we want.
What has been raised by some trade union organisations, like the teachers and the dockers union is central. We need the unity of all sectors that today are in the struggle – workers, students, shantytown dwellers, and social organisations to call a general strike in which all sections of the population can participate.
It is essential that democratic committees of struggle and self-defense are formed in all communities to protect our districts and neighborhoods. The police, the Caribineros, cannot be trusted to undertake this task.
We demand an end to the State of Emergency and the return of the military to barracks from where they should never have left. Repression by the state will resolve nothing as we have already seen. We appeal to the soldiers not to fire against their working-class brothers and sisters. We remind you are the sons of workers of this country and it is your own families that you will end up killing with bullets that you are ordered to fire.
We demand the immediate resignation of Piñera and his government; they are inept and incapable of resolving the concrete problems of the people. The only thing they have done until now is order mass repression.
Together with the resignation of the useless government we demand the end of the Constitution of the dictatorship and demand a revolutionary constituent assembly where the demands of the workers and the poor are really taken into account.
We need to go forward and struggle for a government of the workers. The bosses are of no use to govern our countries, as we have seen by the bosses’ government headed by Sebastian Piñera.
Capitalism is incapable of solving any of the problems that the working class faces. The only alternative we have is to build a democratic socialist society to counterpose to this system of injustice and inequality.
