Capacious andTerritorial:The Left and the Course of the Social Revolt in Chile (original) (raw)
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Social protests, neoliberalism and democratic institutions in Chile
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES, 2022
With the case of contemporary Chile at hand, the article examines the institutional contradiction between neoliberalism and democracy as a source of social protests and popular rebellions. Chile transitioned in 1990 to a representative democracy, presumably encouraging political equality and participation. However, given the orientation of governments toward fostering capitalist accumulation, Chile did not develop mechanisms for fully incorporating into the political arena the emerging and increasingly resourceful civil society. After decades of incubation, this contradiction produced collective grievances that activated social movements and popular revolts. This coalesced in 2019 when a national-scale social uprising opened a process of constitutional change and democratic innovation. I illustrate this argument by examining contemporary student, indigenous, women and labor mobilizations. Democratic governments responded differently to the demands of these four movements depending on the extent they threatened capital accumulation and state sovereignty. I also pay special attention to the 2019 social uprising and the ongoing constitutional change process (until March 2022), which brings exciting innovations to deliberation and democracy.
The paper examines the causes of Chile's October 2019 wave of protest and the path taken in the relationship between institutional policies and social mobilisations, and that led to the 2020 referendum for a New Constitution. It is based on a hypothesis on the transformation of society and the configuration of democracy in its cultural and political dimensions. The key question posed is: To what extent can the two main problems be solved?, to wit: (1) finding a new social-economic order to replace the model imposed during the dictatorship ("Neo-Liberalism with Chilean features")-a model that was tweaked by the Concertación and the Nueva Mayoría Centre-Left coalition governments (Garretón, 2012; Mayol, 2013; Atria; 2013); (2) coming up with new kinds of links between politics and social movements, offering scope for going beyond the classic model and for marking a radical break with the past, as in Chile's case.
Towards New Emancipatory Horizons: Analysis of Autonomous Political Collectives in Chile
The last two decades have seen an increase of Latin American social movements which are continuously resisting and challenging the advance of neoliberal globalization. In this context, countries such as Chile, well known for the consolidation of the neoliberal paradigm, have been the ground for the emergence of interesting collective experiences of anti-capitalist resistance which attempt, from a non-state-centred perspective, to crack the system by tracing new emancipatory horizons. These "newest" expressions of activism have been characterized by emphasizing direct as opposed to representative democracy in which new cultures, logics, and grammars of democracy are developed. Furthermore, these collectives distrust the delegation of political power in bureaucratic elites through the right of voting, and instead, they demand their right to determine how democracy is practiced (Motta, 2009). Drawing on the progress of an ongoing PhD research, the presenter will try to address the theoretical challenges in the study of Chilean autonomous political collectives, focusing on their critique of the representational and state-centered politics and in their assessment of the traditional Left in terms of its revolutionary project. At the same time, the presentation will explore the extent to which these radical groups embody a prefigurative politics in their practices of dissent and how they enact politics in their organizational strategies.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023
As an introductory framework to the dossier, this article analyzes the Chilean political process based on the images that (re)emerged with the 2019 revolt and that were deployed in the constitutional process channeled into a Constitutional Convention (2020–22). It shows how the old ghosts of class, gender, and the nation appear in these “mental images,” the same ghosts that have historically operated in the defeat of transformative projects and contributed to the reproduction of an authoritarian and elitist society, whose neoconservative/neoliberal oligarchy has managed to restore the conditions of its domination. The article proposes these observations to stimulate the reading of the contributions to this dossier, which problematize different aspects of the political process under discussion: the aporetic relationship among revolt, violence, and law; the citizenry's turn from a desire of community and transformation expressed in the revolt to a feeling of fear and attachment to private property; writing as a practice, support, and challenge of the people's critical expression; the tension between the performance of the revolt as a failure and as a reset of neoliberal performativity; and the territorial and deterritorializing wagers in relation to affective infrastructures that became revolt and that continue through other means.
Politics of care from the margins of Chile's social uprising
South American Quarterly, 2024
This essay examines Chile's social uprising through the eyes of Juan (thirty-six) and Marta (fifty-nine), 1 a couple who live in La Bastida, a low-income neighborhood on the periphery of Santiago. Despite a lack of previous experience in social and political organizations, Juan and Marta got involved in one of the many territorial expressions of the critical event that the uprising represented. Through Juan and Marta, we explore how the powerful nature of the uprising drove acts of contention on the urban margins. We also encounter the repressive response of the police-prison apparatus of a state at a loss about how to deal with an event that appeared, at least to some authority figures, of almost otherworldly origin (Dammert and Sazo 2021). The critical force of the uprising resides precisely in this entry into the political space of actors whose presence was unforeseen, and, by some, undesired. To do so, we explore the ethical and biographical dispositions that encouraged Juan and Marta to become politicized as the uprising went on. As in the case of Mauricio Lepín, also discussed in this dossier, Juan's and Marta's experiences allow us to appreciate the shift of two people who began as "othered"-stigmatized as flaites 2-and became activists (lucha dores sociales). This shift, which served as a mode of subjectivation, takes place as a critical attitude unfolds in them, one that finds expression in public interventions in defense of equality and social justice, and in acts of community and neighborhood solidarity.