The last throes of 2022 have evaporated, as an unbalanced, unstable and contradictory expression of the relations of power between the interests of the ruling classes and the broad and heterogeneous movement of the struggles of the workers and the oppressed, and after the pandemic that brought the social revolt of October 2019 to a sudden halt, the Chilean capitalist state and its administrators on duty persist in deepening the policies of monetarist liberalism, precipitating stagflation while releasing targeted bonuses for the ultra-impoverished. Likewise, the state is continentally rankling in its subordination and aspirational fetishism towards the US corporate state. For example, acting like the string of post-dictatorship civilian administrations that began in 1990, Boric greeted with Olympian alacrity, like Biden from the White House, the illegitimate presidency and serial human rights violator of Dina Boluarte, the media caudilla of Peru’s last coup d’état against a president elected at the ballot box.
In this respect, Boric’s government, whose marketing of generational change in ‘politics’ was shattered soon after, was quickly taken over by the strongest and most reactionary tendency of the Socialist Party, following the lead of its plenipotentiary finance minister, the former president of the Central Bank, Mario Marcel, celebrated a thousand times by the employers’ union (Confederation of Production and Commerce, CPC). In this way, the government has been characterised, among other things, by adopting the agenda of the so-called traditional right. Not only is it holding captive the young people who were arrested by the police during the social uprising three years ago (after a limited and “symbolic” pardon for 12 of them on 30 December), but it has also redoubled fiscal resources for the militarisation of Mapuche ancestral territory, multiplying the political imprisonment of their fighters, repeatedly extending the state of emergency in the area, and unsuccessfully trying to intimidate the spirit and ancient ethics of a people who, embodying the principles of territory and autonomy, are leading various processes of recovery of lands that were taken from them by landowning settlers and the forestry industry.
Boric also recently signed the anti-social and enemy of popular sovereignty Free Trade Agreement TPP 11 (Trans-Pacific Partnership Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement), a ‘new generation’ economic-financial alliance through which the big monopolies and multinational corporate oligopolies negotiate directly with the governments of the day, perpetuating the primary export and extractivist condition of Chile at the cost of greater exploitation, precarious labour and plundering of nature. And if big capital does not meet its expectations, it can take the states themselves to the courts created for this purpose.
If the social fighters never had any significant expectations that Boric would lead a consistently reformist administration, neither was his spectacular shift to the right predicted. After the exit plebiscite that rejected the proposed Constitution agreed by an ad hoc convention, there was the institutional political translation that the population would have come to its senses and become militant for the authoritarian, patriarchal, conservative and anti-democratic Chilean right. In this sense, the problem is not that the right wing turns the result of a plebiscite into a victory for the interests of the classes it represents. The problem is that the government of the day, self-proclaimed ‘progressive, ecologist and feminist’, behaves in the same way, transmuting the contents of its electoral promises in order to adapt to a supposed new scenario of alternation of forces from above. This has meant closing, for the benefit of the big economic groups, the few progressive aspects of the tax, pension and other reforms; as well as reproducing the historical formulas of the oligarchy to write a new constitutional text, this time called “Agreement for Chile”, where its debate and result are concentrated in a deeply discredited legislative power, not voted to write constitutions, and a decisive “group of experts” not democratically elected. Such an agreement, which only excites its own signatories, is not substantially different from the way the dictatorship’s constitution was made and is a replica of the elitist ways in which the last 200 years’ constitutions have been dictated. In this respect, there is already a proliferation of voices postulating the rejection of the agreement imposed by the institutional political caste.
If the social needs and rights of the great majorities, which have been openly manifested since October 2019, will not be satisfied by the current administration or by neoliberal capitalism, there are no government initiatives to alleviate the social pain whose main cruxes are job insecurity and worsening employment, the fall in wages, the daily increase in the cost of living, a ruined public health system based on deadly waiting lists; education that reproduces inequality, the impossibility of owning one’s own home, the absence of time to live and the vertiginous increase in mental illnesses resulting from social relations that have turned all the moments that fill the hours and days of Chilean society into merchandise, that is, objects of alienation and profit.
From below, as the most pressing needs of society that triggered October 2019 have not been resolved, the most dynamic and active social subjects of the oppressed remain: fractions of popular youth that to this day persevere in the work of producing open territorial processes and direct community organisation. It is true: a large segment of those who participated in the social upheaval disappeared from the streets and returned to the pavements, while others are even part of the government. But there are also pre-existing anti-capitalist groupings, or those that were forged in the heat of the revolt, that have gained relative growth, both outside and inside the institutional struggle.
But the awakened people look for each other and for their comrades. It coordinates and distances itself, re-convenes and then makes its own way. Perhaps it will be an eventual new explicit moment of the class struggle and the collective will conditioned by it, due to the urgency of concentrating forces, reasons and organisation, will be ready to reunite the atomised efforts, overcome the identitarian mystifications, and restart the route from the highest place where the struggle was temporarily frozen. This time, however, not in the form of a mere sum of demands, but with objectives as clearly organised as the elementary needs of ordinary people themselves. And those contents, however simple they may seem, require one or more political instruments which do not yet exist and which can only emerge volcanically, from below, from the genuine and creative course of concrete popular struggles.
