Chile: Open letter to the outraged / Down with the pact! For a new anticapitalist left

We reproduce the lastest flyer of the Chilean Movimiento Anticapitalista

We are celebrating a month of the uprising that keeps us on the streets protesting against this model that makes life precarious. At the barricades, in the squares, paralyzing the country in general strikes, debating and developing self-organization in assemblies and cabildos. From below, without individualities or representatives of those who have governed the last 30 years, building a process that has shaken the institutional, political, social and economic structure inherited from Pinochetism.

After the November 12 general strike, with the government and the right cornered, the entire political caste, including the Broad Front (FA) and the Communist Party (PC), rushed to find a way to try to take politics away from the streets and return them to an institutional channel. Thus they gave a teetering government a breath of air by cooking up an eleventh hour pact behind the backs of the mobilized people.

They agreed on a plebiscite to be held in April 2020 to ask what the people have already shouted in the streets and do not to mention the option of “Constituent Assembly”. Providing the right with veto power through the requirement of 2/3 of the members of the “Convention” to approve the articles of a new constitution. Sustaining the current electoral system that gives priority to traditional parties for the election of “convention” deputies.  In the end, aiming for changes to the extent that is possible within the limits of Pinochet´s constitution.

People´s rejection, debacle and ambiguities of the left that pacts

However, the change occurring in our country is historic, nothing will be as before. The historical revenge that caused the people to take politics by assault dismantled the entire “we cannot” false ideology proclaimed by those who adapt to power.

Despite all the attempt to deactivate the mobilization process, including an intervention “for peace” at Plaza Italia and then again with repression, hundreds of thousands returned to win the streets on Friday 15. Trade unions, feminist groups, assemblies and organizations of the mobilized people, quickly pronounced themselves against the pact. The “peace pact” debuted with a new death at the hands of State repression.

Crises broke out in many of the regime’s parties. Particularly in the FA, which not only signed the pact, but also became one of the main spokesmen of its defense. There were resignations and pronouncements of rejection. With the signing of the pact, the leadership of the FA has crowned a process that definitely transformed it into part of the old regime in less than two years.

The Communist Party tried to cover itself by rehearsing ambiguous positions, but always marking its predisposition to participate in an institutional solution. They raised a constitutional accusation without voting it when it was deliberated, agreed with Christian Democrats on an arrangement to negotiate with the government, then abstained from the pact, finally stating that it is a positive development. All this in a few days.

It’s time for a new project on the left

We know that there are thousands of us who repudiate the “cooked up” pact of the political caste. We have talked with hundreds of activists that are disillusioned with the parliamentary left that joined or endorsed the pact. Comrades that we meet in the streets, militants and supporters of the FA and the youth of the PC, as well as groups and tendencies that have expressed their repudiation to the actions of leaderships that have collaborated in an agreement with the right.

Meeting of the Movimiento Anticapitalista in Santiago

To all of them we say: now is the time to launch a new alternative. We need to build a political tool to strengthen mobilization and self-organization; not to supplant it, but to help deepen the process and prepare the way for those who have never governed to rule. The time has come to break with all the old structures and begin the construction of a truly revolutionary and anti-capitalist project.

Dozens of activists have atended Movimiento Anticapitalista´s discussion meetings.

A consistent, democratic, feminist, ecosocialist alternative with an internationalist perspective. One that will fight, immediately, against the pact and Piñera´s impunity, for a general strike until he falls, organized by the strike committees and assemblies, to impose a Free, Sovereign, Democratic and Plurinational Constituent Assembly. And from there advocate:

* For an end to the precariousness of life: salaries equal to the cost of living; no more AFPs, free public education and health care with a feminist perspective, nationalization of basic rights, recovery of common resources, forgiveness of all debts, access to decent housing.

* To end past and present impunity: judgment and punishment with jail to all genocides of the past and the present, declassification of all the dictatorship´s archives, no more pacts of silence, dismantling of the Pinochet army.

* Against extractivism and the contamination of water, land and air, prohibition of mega-mining, monoculture and agro-toxins, organic farming and development of non-polluting industries.

* Sovereignty and self-determination of peoples and territories in resistance. Demilitarization of Wallmapu.

* For women’s and LGBT rights: against sexist violence and femicides, emergency budget for free comprehensive assistance, shelters and subsidies for women, with control of women’s organizations, trans labor quota, legal, safe and free abortion in the health system for all gestating bodies, recognition and socialization of domestic work.

* Against the political caste: every office holder should earn the same as a worker and be recallable.

So the caste´s pact does not take away what millions of us have conquered in the streets, the fundamental present task is to build a political alternative that is consistent in this fight. To those who sympathize with these ideas, we invite you to join in building the Movimiento Anticapitalista to promote a new anti-capitalist left to transform the country.