During the course of the past decade, the popular Gramscian slogan—‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’—has been updated twice: first on the optimistic side, and second on the pessimistic one. The waves of global protests, revolts and uprisings that took place following the 2007 financial crisis led social movement scholars (Della Porta and Mattoni 2014; Della Porta 2015) and radical theorists (Butler 2011; Hardt and Negri 2011) to highlight the ability of new and old subjects to resist capitalism and develop new forms of radical democracy. In light of these heterogeneous expressions of unrest in divergent political settings, the sense that ‘change’ was coming gained momentum. In the preface to one of the three large-scale conferences on the Idea of Communism, we read:
The long night of the left is drawing to a close. The defeat, denunciations and despair of the 1980s and 1990s, the triumphalist ‘end of history’, the unipolar world of American hegemony – all are fast becoming old news (…) Greece, France, India and Thailand are introducing wide sections of the population and, critically, young people to ideas of resistance, rebellion and emancipation. If 1989 was the inaugural year of the new world order, 2001 announced its decline, and the collapse of the banking system in 2008 marked the beginning of a return to full-blown history. If that was our ‘new world order’, it is the shortest the world has even seen. (Douzinas and Žižek 2010, p. 2)
However, this initial moment of ‘effervescence’ has been followed by a moment of balance and critical evaluation. ‘Now, after a year, there is not a day that does not provide new evidence on how fragile and inconsistent that awakening was’ (Žižek 2016, p. 6), as the editors of the third occasion of the same conference wrote four years later. Regardless of the position one occupies on the optimism-pessimism spectrum, the main assumption underpinning this book is that critical social theorists can use this moment of political awakening and its subsequent disillusionment or reflection to reconnect with critical theory’s explicitly political emancipatory aims. While it is true that the mechanisms underlying neoliberal resilience have been able once again to restrain social actors’ transformative capacities, it is also true that a close look at the moment of attempted rupture is necessary if we want to avoid the extremes of naïve triumphalism and cynical pessimism.
This book emerges out of a context in which this shift from ‘effervescence’ to critical evaluation has been noticed but has yet to be subjected to an in-depth study: namely, 2011’s mobilisations in Chile (Donoso and Von Bülow 2017). Described by David Harvey as the first ‘neoliberal experiment of state formation’ (Harvey 2007), and by Raúl Zibechi as a ‘neoliberal paradise’ (Zibechi 2007), Chilean society has been largely seen by advocators of neoliberalism, scholars and politicians as a model of economic development and political stability (Martínez Bengoa and Díaz Pérez 1996). Chile was not only the first country in the world in which a radical programme of neoliberal policies was carried out as a reaction to a socialist agenda; it was also one of the first countries in Latin America where the democratic governments that succeeded the dictatorship administered the neoliberal policies introduced by the military government. The Chilean experience has shown how neoliberalism can be translated into social programmes that favour citizenship participation and social protection, and the extent to which liberal democracy provides a fertile institutional framework for capital reproduction. Indeed, whilst during the 1990s, Chile was taken as a model of economic growth and development, in recent years the country has been once again heralded as a model, this time of a new, reformed neoliberalism, in which social issues become important for the state. As Marcus Taylor (2006) has claimed, Chile thus can be conceived of as a successful Latin American version of a ‘third way’ between orthodox neoliberalism and leftist projects.
The bloody US-backed military coup that killed, made to disappear and tortured more than 40,000 people, overthrewing the democratically elected government of the Popular Unity, set up the conditions for an unprecedented process of neoliberalisation. Under the Popular Unity government, the earlier compromise that the national landowning oligarchies and upper classes had reached with the middle classes and popular sectors in previous decades was broken, leading to Chilean political and economic elites to violently protect their interests. The Allende government radicalised the principles of national developmentalism—inward economic expansion, universal welfare, agrarian reform, nationalisation of key national industries—which resulted in the paradox of a state dependent on global capitalist dynamics in order to secure recourses for the application of a socialist agenda. After the coup, the new Junta started an unprecedented process of neoliberalisation that eroded the foundations of the import substitution development model, prevalent in most Latin American countries since the 1930s. Through state terrorism, the military dictatorship began a radical transformation of Chile’s social structure and institutions.
Whilst the national developmentalist model was oriented towards protection of the national industry under a Keynesian interventionist state, the set of reforms carried out two years after the brutal coup by a group of economists and policymakers educated at the Chicago School during the mid-1950s—the so-called Chicago Boys—aimed to free the market from state constraints and, more generally, to create a society modelled, in all spheres, by the rationality of the market. In order to achieve this, the ‘Chicago Boys’ implanted an extensive programme of privatisations and market liberalisation. This programme included the introduction of a market-based model in key areas of social provision—such as pensions, healthcare and education—the drastic lowering of import tariffs and the introduction of a free market price policy, among other measures. Along with the proscription of political parties, the Military Junta dismantled the organisational social bases of the Allende government, significantly debilitating the power of workers’ unions. After 17 years of dictatorship, and due to the capacity of social actors such as feminists, pobladores and students to resist and mobilise against Pinochet, a democratic coalition took office. Paradoxically, the post-Pinochet political system excluded and discouraged the organisation and participation of those social actors who pushed for Pinochet’s overthrow (Paley 2001). Moreover, the Concertación maintained the principles of neoliberalism, modernising the state and creating a subsidy-based system to provide social services, such as housing, higher education and social security, among others (Vergara et al. 1999).
The degrees of social mobilisation in Chile had remained minimal since the return to democracy in 1990. After 17 years of military dictatorship, Chilean society was not used to massive public demonstrations or to public debates over the principles upon which the celebrated ‘Chilean model’ was built. Thus, the year 2011 was significant not only because a wave of protests developed but, more crucially, because such protests marked completely unexpected expressions of ‘social outrage’ in a context of political and economic stability. Students demanding free and high-quality education burst into the streets and sustained a mobilisation over eight months, challenging Chilean market-based educational policies, influencing the political agenda and, more generally, questioning the principles of the political system and the socio-economic order. Organised groups of miners, subcontracted workers, feminists, Mapuche, socio-ambientalist and pobladores joined the students in demanding social rights and, more crucially, in criticising Chilean society as a whole (Donoso and Von Bülow 2017). Although the wave of mobilisations that took place across the world around the time was heterogeneous and influenced by specific national contexts, the ‘Chilean case’ shows the extent to which a systemic critique of neoliberalism can disrupt the sociopolitical and economic consensus largely shaped by the forces of capital, and the limits and possibilities of political subjects to resist and emerge as a powerful force of solidarity and contestation.
1.1 New Departures?
As a former sociology student at the Universidad de Chile, I was familiar with diagnoses that emphasised both the causes of and the limits to any serious attempts to contest neoliberalism in Chile. I had learned that, unlike other countries in Latin America (such as Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia or Brazil), where the introduction of neoliberal policies was followed by considerable levels of social mobilisation and protests, in Chile the possibility of mobilising against neoliberalism was blocked by a number of objective and subjective conditions (Moulian 2002; Richard 2002; Lechner 2006; Garretón 2007). Indeed, the ‘sociology of transition’ in Chile emphasised that the path of modernisation taken by the centre-left coalition that came to power after the dictatorship—the Concertación—created the seemingly paradoxical scenario of a transition to democracy without the participation of relevant social actors: the combination of a democratic political regime with a highly demobilised society. The pervasiveness of a technocratic ideology in the state, the persistence of authoritarian enclaves, but also a consensus over the inevitability of the socio-economic model imposed during the dictatorship, served to form a society in which the stability of the political regime was obtained at the price of the demobilisation of the popular sectors (Silva 2009). This is the reason why the process of ‘normalisation’ that followed the mobilisations—epitomised by the election of Michelle Bachelet, former president and member of the socialist party, who integrated many of the protesters’ demands into her campaign—was experienced by many of the protesters with a mixture of excitement and caution at first, and then frustration. The political and economic reforms proposed by the new government did not secure the establishment of a free and public system of higher education in the long term. Key social services—housing, health, social security—and natural recourses—including a privatised water supply—remain highly commodified areas and important sources of capital accumulation in Chile. In other words, the programme of social, economic and political reforms advanced by Bachelet in her campaign did not deliver fully on her promises (Fernandez and Vera 2012). Bachelet’s government was unable to secure another period in office for the Concertación. In 2017, the former president, right-wing billionaire Sebastián Piñera, won the presidential election. With the election of Piñera, the ‘classic’ priorities of governments previous to the period of mobilisations were brought back into the public agenda—national and domestic security, economic gr...