The following is worth quoting for its sheer eloquence. It is a quote from Salvadore Allende in his first address to the Chilean Parliament after his 1970 election to Chilean presidency. Allende was a Marxist socialist committed to democracy. Marxism, distorted beyond recognition in the West, in its simplest terms is simply a scientific analysis and approach to historical development.
Allende was overthrown in a U.S. engineered coup in late 1973. He died during the coup by two shots to the chin by an automatic AK-47. The official conclusion is that his death was a suicide, although this conclusion is somewhat controversial.
He was replaced by the authoritarian Augusto Pinochet who ended four decades of democratic rule. During the Pinochet reign, at least 3,000 dissidents were “disappeared”, some estimates are many times higher. The Pinochet regime’s economic policies were coached by the “Chicago Boys”, a group of former students of Economist Milton Friedman who, along with Friedman, from the University of Chicago, directed drastic free market reforms.
Whether one likes the concept of socialism or not, the idealism expressed in Allende’s address to the Chilean Parliament is to be admired.
Allende:
“This is an unprecedented time, which offers us the material means of realising the most generous utopian dreams of the past. The only thing that prevents our achieving this is the heritage of greed, of fear and of obsolete institutional traditions. Between our time and that of the liberation of man on a planetary scale, this inheritance has to be overcome. Only in this way will it be possible to call upon men to reconstruct their lives, not as products of a past of slavery and exploitation, but in the most conscious realisation of their noblest potentialities. This is the socialist ideal.”
…..
“Speaking frankly, our task is to define and put into practice, as the Chilean road to socialism, a new model of the State, of the economy and of society which revolves around man’s needs and aspirations. For this we need the determination of those who have dared to reconsider the world in terms of a project designed for the service of man. There are no previous experiments that we can use as models – we shall have to develop the theory and practice of new forms of social, political and economic organisation, both in order to break with under-development and create socialism.”
-Salvador Allende, 1970, First speech to the Chilean parliament after his election.