The tragic death of Chilean democracy has led to as much theoretical soulsearching on the Left as it has to relief on the Right. Not unexpectedly, the Chilean Communists have attempted to wash their hands of Socialist-MIR adventurism while the militant Left blames the dead end on the to socialism, alternately on U.S. intervention and the lack of revolutionary commitment on the part of the Communists and the Allende Wing of the Chilean Socialist Party. In this dispute on the Left all are correct-for there are many reasons that the Popular Unity (UP) coalition failed to lead Chile down the to socialism. U.S. foreign policy and the invisible blockade played a role as did the ambiguity, dissension, corruption, and lack of concrete programmatic objectives by the members of the UP coalition. A strong opposition, with multi-class support and a strategic hold on crucial posts in the existing state apparatus also played a role. Last, but obviously of considerable import, the coercive apparatus of the state (military and police) retained autonomy from the supposedly supreme executive authority. The government lacked a reliable instrument for enforcing existing law; imposing a revolutionary legal structure was, without a counterbalance to the armed forces, out of the question. Other problems also existed-lack of a vanguard party, economic debility and vulnerability, and so on. All this has now become grist for the theoretical mill. What has not been dealt with, however, is the matter of whether the road to as envisioned by influential members of the Popular Unity coalition involved anything revolutionary at all. And more particularly, whether the peasants and rural workers had anything to gain by following the UP (road to socialism). Posed in this sense (restricted to the countryside) the question is a narrow one. Yet the answer has implications that go well beyond the countryside. The reason for this, simply put, is that the UP program was an essentially conservative, statist, faithless pathwell-trodden by regimes of Right, Center, and Left with several things in common: mistrust of the working class, disdain for peasant mentality, unwillingness to concede that peasants might be a source of organizational ingenuity and productive work. It demonstrated an insistence on centralized decision-making (even where regional or local councils were formed to represent the workers and peasants) and, terror at the thought of real popular participation-uncontrolled by intellectuals and party politicians. For despite the rhetorical commitment to democratic socialism, Unidad Popular was a movement that patronized the working class and sought to impose bureaucratic solutions in the countryside in a tradition as old as Hispanic America and as young as modern Eastern Europe. There can be no democratic socialism without democracy. And there can be no democratic socialism until intellectuals, party cadres, and bureaucrats are brought under the control of the working classes. In the countryside this means the peasantry and rural workers.