The Coup in Chile | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/chile-coup-santiago-allende-social-democracy-september-11
Here is probably the major reason for the military putsch. So long as the Chilean right believed that the experience of Popular Unity would come to an end by the will of the electors, it maintained a democratic attitude. It was worth respecting the Constitution while waiting for the storm to pass. When the Right came to fear that it would not pass and that the play of liberal institutions would result in the maintenance of Salvador Allende in power and in the development of socialism, it preferred violence to the law.
La lutte des classe ordinaire et la guerre des classes
... class struggle also means, and often means first of all, the struggle waged by the dominant class, and the state acting on its behalf, against the workers and the subordinate classes. By definition, struggle is not a one way process; but it is just as well to emphasize that it is actively waged by the dominant class or classes, and in many ways much more effectively waged by them than the struggle waged by the subordinate classes.
Secondly, but in the same context, there is a vast difference to be made — sufficiently vast as to require a difference of name — between on the one hand “ordinary” class struggle, of the kind which goes on day in day out in capitalist societies, at economic, political, ideological, micro- and macro-, levels, and which is known to constitute no threat to the capitalist framework within which it occurs; and, on the other hand, class struggle which either does, or which is thought likely to, affect the social order in really fundamental ways.
The first form of class struggle constitutes the stuff, or much of the stuff, of the politics of capitalist society. It is not unimportant, or a mere sham; but neither does it stretch the political system unduly. The latter form of struggle requires to be described not simply as class struggle, but as class war.
Where men of power and privilege (and it is not necessarily those with most power and privilege who are the most uncompromising) do believe that they confront a real threat from below, that the world they know and like and want to preserve seems undermined or in the grip of evil and subversive forces, then an altogether different form of struggle comes into operation, whose acuity, dimensions, and universality warrants the label “class war.”
Chile had known class struggle within a bourgeois democratic framework for many decades: that was its tradition. With the coming to the presidency of Allende, the conservative forces progressively turned class struggle into class war — and here too, it is worth stressing that it was the conservative forces which turned the one into the other.
Pourquoi des élections ne constituent pas de garantie contre un putsch de la droite
This is that the higher the percentage of votes cast in any election for the Left, the more likely it is that the conservative forces will be intimidated, demoralized, divided, and uncertain as to their course.
These forces are not homogeneous; and it is obvious that electoral demonstrations of popular support are very useful to the Left, in its confrontation with the Right, so long as the Left does not take them to be decisive. In other words, percentages may help to intimidate the Right — but not to disarm it.
It may well be that the Right would not have dared strike when it did if Allende had obtained higher electoral percentages. But if, having obtained these percentages, Allende had continued to pursue the course on which he was bent, the Right would have struck whenever opportunity had offered. The problem was to deny it the opportunity; or, failing this, to make sure that the confrontation would occur on the most favorable possible terms.
En 2016 au Brésil la droite n’avait pas besoin du militaire pour son coup d’état et un an auparavant le docteur Schäuble pouvait imposer un changement de politique radical au gouvernement grec sans même évoquer la possibilité d’un putsch. Maintenant on assiste à la décomposition du schema politique allemand traditionnel, à l’abolition des restes de l’état de providence et à la transformation des forces armées allemandes Bundeswehr dans une troupe pour le combat en milieu urbain. Considérant le contexte économique actuel, on peut envisager des développements assez inquiétants.
Il est aujourd’hui plus urgent que jamais de défendre la démocratie contre ses ennemis.
source alternative : ▻https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1973/10/chile.htm