It was really astonishing, seeing these "revolutionaries" discussing all their "successes", which consisted of theft, seizing industries and running them into the ground with no plan to last longer than a month, and gloating about how they managed to "win" elections despite getting a minority of the vote. They dismissed the value provided by management and professionals, and even noted that the most-skilled workers opposed their revolution, but never paused to imagine that they might have any reason beyond greed - and meanwhile proceeded to use up all their reserves without replenishing them.

Please keep this in mind, Baldur... I am NOT a vanguardist, which is a Leninist and (to some extent) Trotskyist conception, and had nothing to do with the Marxist formulation of socialism as a classless, stateless, and moneyless economy. I do not support a small-ish group of worker revolutionaries opposing the government and attempting to overthrow it and then run the system "on behalf of" the rest of the working class. This is especially ineffective in a nation with Third World conditions. This type of revolution has been attempted numerous times over the late 19th and 20th centuries, and has failed every time. Marx and Engels, for the record, were explicit that the vast majority of the working class must be on the side of the revolution, and must be prepared to take, hold, and run the industries prior to the conclusion of the revolution. Such a thing can only be successful if it occurs within a First World framework of technological advance.

This is one of the reasons I get flustered and angry when what I support gets conflated with these misguided Leninist vanguard party revolutionaries, and the ostensibly state-controlled system they created when their revolution went the distance. You will note many of them even refer to themselves as "Leninist-Marxist," which means they have the very misguided goal of (at least, according to them) establishing a Marxist system utilizing Leninist methodologies, which Marx and Engels never supported in any way. Many of these revolutionaries do this more out of desperation than anything else.

This is not to say that Chile does not have any problems. Of course it does, just like every other nation, but it has clearly come a long way from the brink of disaster which Allende led it to in 1973.

The thing is, though, it is not full of a prospering working class in the manner our dear Captain claimed. That was my main point. Pinochet was a puppet of the U.S., which means he was not of the intent to create a worker-friendly system. Moreover, you can rest assured that if Allende was down with the U.S. government rather than in opposition to it, he would have received plenty of support under the condition of doing things in a way that was friendly to U.S. business interests... as opposed to either his own interests or in the hoped-for interests of the working class, whichever the case may have been.