I’m watching the DNC, and it’s made me even more aware of the power of liberal bourgeois democracies to let out a little revolutionary energy whenever it gets close to the edge, through concessional policies, like New Deal policies or whatever Kamala might do if she wins, or even the act of voting and campaigning itself. Do they have to go through a fascism phase first, or has there been a liberal bourgeois democracy that has successfully had a socialist revolution? Will it take new theory to figure it out?
They got owned because they didn’t have control of the state, they just had elected office and, iirc, even took measures towards civilian disarmament on top of that, so when the military, which was just the same military as before Allende took office, did a coup, of course they succeeded.
As Lenin repeated many times (quoting I believe Marx), socialists cannot merely lay hold of the ready-made state machinery. That’s exactly what Allende did and it would have been very difficult for it to produce any other outcome.