For Chileans

For Chileans, the Choice in
Today’s Election Is Socialism or

Barbarism
BY
DAVID DUHALDE
If socialist Gabriel Boric can consolidate the left-wing votes
among those committed to the constitutional process and
those fearful of a return to Pinochet-era dictatorship and
repression, he can win a majority of Chilean voters in
today’s election.
Chilean presidential candidates Gabriel Boric (L) José Antonio Kast (R) pose before a
debate ahead of the presidential runoff election. (ELVIS GONZALEZ/POOL/AFP via
Getty Images) (Composite image)
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Jeremy Corbyn
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What the NBA Championship Means to Me
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe Talks to Jacobin
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Chileans vote today between two presidential candidates: one that could be
the most radical leftist since Salvador Allende or another easily as reactionary
as far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The outcome of this contest’s stark contrast between left-wing Gabriel Boric
of the Social Convergence Party and José Antonio Kast of the Republican
Party — a name inspired by the United States’ GOP — will have impacts
beyond Chile. The viability of Chile’s major recent upheavals against
neoliberalism, including the social uprising in 2019 that sparked the election
of a constituent assembly to replace the dictatorship-era constitution, is being
tested in this race. Whichever side wins will likely carry momentum into
upcoming regional elections elsewhere in Latin America, like Colombia’s and
Brazil’s presidential contests next year.
The two second-round presidential candidates are both out of the Chilean
mainstream and in relatively new political parties, but the similarities end
there. Boric is a thirty-five-year-old former student leader who rose to
prominence during the Chilean Winter, a 2011–13 youth uprising against
neoliberal education reform that culminated in the last decade with him and
other young leftists in the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) coalition winning
congressional office alongside more historic left parties. Boric’s coalition,
Apruebo Dignidad (Approve Dignity) has deep ties to popular movements
new and old.
Kast, two decades Boric’s senior, is the son of a former German officer with
ties to the Nazi Party. The ultraright-winger was the only major presidential
candidate to stand against the constitutional process and has continued to
oppose abortion, gender, and sexual rights while Chile liberalized laws on
issues like same-sex marriage.
These two candidates have opposing visions for Chile: Boric’s program
might, in the short term, move the country toward social democracy, while
Kast’s could send Chile back to Pinochet-era repression. But reading the US
media, you’d think both were equally dangerous. As Ari Paul summed up in
FAIR, mainstream American journalists have created a false equivalency
between the two, where each takes the country down a different but equally
destructive path.
A major reason Chileans have these two options today is that the first round of
the presidential election in November demonstrated the collapse of the historic
center-left and center-right blocs. Since the return to democracy around 1990,
Chile has been governed by two coalitions made up of the Christian
Democrats, social democratic parties, and, rarely, the Communist Party or two
mainstream right-wing parties. Last month, these two coalitions finished not
only behind Boric and Kast but also behind Franco Parisi — a newcomer
excluded from the debates, partly due to him living in Alabama. (Some
suspect he has not returned to Chile to avoid revealing his assets.) His vote
total mostly reflects a protest against the status quo, but also demonstrates the
lack of faith voters have in the former governing coalitions after thirty years.
Of the seven candidates who ran in November, the right-wing contenders held
a slight majority of the votes in the first round. Still, despite the disappointing
results, there is a strong chance for Boric to win today. He has received the
open support of the center-left parties and other major progressive candidates.
Kast’s hard-right positions are now under more scrutiny and have weakened
his support. Boric can consolidate the left-wing votes among those committed
to the constitutional process and those fearful of a return to Pinochet-era
repression, winning a majority that escaped him before.
Boric continues to slightly best Kast in the polls as well. While these surveys
can be unreliable, they did accurately predict Kast would take a slight lead in
the first round. As polling becomes somewhat unpredictable as fewer and
fewer potential voters respond to calls, neither side is too confident it can rely
on surveys for an accurate level of support. In this election, as the saying goes,
the only poll that matters is on election day.
The axiom is more relevant given that Chile bans releasing of public polling
about two weeks before the presidential vote. In my time in Santiago as the
official Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) representative among
international observers, I have met with traditional left parties and the newer
ones, all of which are supporting Boric. (DSA recently issued a statement in
support of Apruebo Dignidad.) Those who are still receiving internal polling
have said that the race is neck and neck.
Chilean law also prohibits electioneering in the forty-eight hours before

election day starts. On Thursday, both campaigns held closing campaign
rallies to demonstrate support across the country. Boric’s Santiago rally was
estimated by Frente Amplio to have tens of thousands in attendance who came
to hear not just him but famous Chilean musicians such as Ana Tijoux and
Illapu, plus elected leaders such as Santiago’s young Communist mayor Irací
Hassler Jacob. The event had a rock concert atmosphere; Kast’s closing
events, meanwhile, were much smaller.
The large crowd was notable, as the first round’s closing campaign rallies
were much tinier in comparison, according to people close to the races, with
some events last November only reaching several hundred militants. The hope
is that this surge demonstrates, at the very least, an uptick in youth enthusiasm
to vote. In such a tight race, neither side can afford to lose any votes, and
young people turning out could swing the election in favor of Boric.
Coincidentally, also on Thursday, Pinochet’s infamous widow and money

launderer María Lucía Hiriart Rodríguez died at age ninety-nine. Kast has
used the opportunity to attack those celebrating her death as a threat to
security. At Plaza Dignidad, I saw firsthand the gathering of nearly a thousand
people to cheer her passing. Shortly afterward, the police closed the streets. It
is the same playbook everywhere: a few protesters can lead to a massive
police overreaction and the right wing taking advantage to play on some of the
public’s concerns about security.
These dynamics matter in such a close contest. If Kast can play on the
public’s fears, real and manufactured, he can pull through. Boric will need a
base that goes beyond those fearful of a return to Pinochet-era rule in order to
win. This is doubly true as Kast’s supporters are now adopting the Donald
Trump playbook, pledging to challenge the election results in the final days if
Kast doesn’t win.
Whoever wins today will not find governing easy. Congress, whose elections
were set last month, is nearly evenly divided. The constitutional process
continues and will be up for another plebiscite. While Boric will likely not
face the street protests that Kast may, he will need to find a way to resolve the
issue of pardoning political prisoners currently in jail, and work with a
national police force he is seeking to reform and a military not known for its
commitment to democracy. Kast’s illiberal democratic efforts will
undoubtedly be met with serious resistance, both electorally and through
movements beyond the Left.
No matter the victor, only the Chilean people will determine their future.
Their choice truly is between democracy and authoritarianism, socialism and
barbarism.
For Karl Marx, Alienation Was

Central to Understanding
Capitalism
BY
MARCELLO MUSTO
Karl Marx’s groundbreaking account of labor alienation
forms an invaluable part of his thought. For Marx, alienation
was fundamental to grasping capitalism and how to
dismantle it.
Karl Marx’s concept of alienation described the labor product confronting labor “as
something alien, as a power independent of the producer.” (Javad Esmaeili / Unsplash)
Editors
Jeremy Corbyn
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Michael Stipe
Since they were first published in the 1930s, Karl Marx’s early writings on
alienation have served as a radical touchstone in the fields of social and
philosophical thought, generating followers, contestation, and debate. In
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx first developed his
concept of alienated labor, pushing beyond the existing philosophical,
religious, and political notions of alienation to ground it in the economic
sphere of material production. This was a groundbreaking move, but
alienation was a concept that Marx never put down, and he would go on to
refine and develop his theory in the coming decades.
Although thinkers on the topic of alienation have, for the most part, continued
to make use of Marx’s early writings, it is in fact in the later work that Marx
provides a fuller, more developed account of alienation, as well as a theory of
its overcoming. In the notebooks of the Grundrisse (1857-58), as well as in
other preparatory manuscripts for Capital (1867), Marx delivers a conception
of alienation that is historically grounded in his analysis of social relations
under capitalism. If this important aspect of Marx’s theory has been
underappreciated until now, it nonetheless remains the key to understanding
what the mature Marx meant by alienation — and helps provide the
conceptual tools that will be needed in transforming the hyperexploitative
economic and social system that we live in today.
A Long Trajectory
The first systematic account of alienation was provided by Georg W. F. Hegel
in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where the terms Entausserung (“self-
externalization”), Entfremdung (“estrangement”),
and Vergegenständlichung (literally: “to-make-into-an-object”) were used to
describe Spirit’s becoming other than itself in the realm of objectivity.
The concept of alienation continued to feature prominently in the writings of

the Hegelian left, and Ludwig Feuerbach developed a theory of religious
alienation in The Essence of Christianity (1841) where he described man’s
projection of his own essence onto an imaginary deity. But the concept of
alienation subsequently disappeared from philosophical reflection, and none
of the major thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century paid it any
great attention. Even Marx rarely used the term in the works published during
his lifetime, and discussion of alienation was notably absent from the
Marxism of the Second International (1889–1914).
Marx’s concept of alienated labor pushed beyond the existing philosophical,

religious, and political notions of alienation to ground it in the economic sphere
of material production
It was during this period, however, that several thinkers developed concepts
that later came to be associated with alienation. In his The Division of Labor
in Society (1893) and Suicide (1897), Émile Durkheim introduced the term
“anomie” to indicate a set of phenomena whereby the norms guaranteeing
social cohesion fall into crisis following a major extension of the division of
labor. Social upheaval associated with major changes in the production
process also lay at the basis of the thinking of German sociologists. Georg
Simmel in The Philosophy of Money (1900) paid great attention to the
dominance of social institutions over individuals and to the growing
impersonality of human relations. Max Weber, in Economy and
Society (1922), dwelled on the phenomena of “bureaucratization” and
“rational calculation” in human relations, considering them to be the essence
of capitalism. But these authors thought they were describing unstoppable
tendencies of human relations, and their reflections were often guided by a
wish to improve the existing social and political order — certainly not to
replace it with a different one.
The return to a Marxist theory of alienation occurred in large part thanks to

György Lukács, who in History and Class Consciousness (1923) introduced
the term “reification” (Versachlichung) to describe the phenomenon whereby
labor activity confronts human beings as something objective and
independent, dominating them through external autonomous laws. When
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 finally appeared in
German in 1932, the hitherto unpublished text from Marx’s youth caused
waves throughout the world. Marx’s concept of alienation described the labor
product confronting labor “as something alien, as a power independent of the
producer.” He listed four ways in which the worker is alienated in bourgeois
society: (1) by the product of his labor, which becomes “an alien object that
has power over him”; (2) in his working activity, which he perceives as
“directed against himself,” as if it “does not belong to him”; (3) by “man’s
species-being,” which is transformed into “a being alien to him”; and (4) by
other human beings, and in relation “to their labor and the object of the labor.”
For Marx, unlike for Hegel, alienation was not coterminous with
objectification as such, but rather with a particular phenomenon within a
precise form of economy: that is, wage labor and the transformation of labor
products into objects standing opposed to producers. Whereas Hegel presented
alienation as an ontological manifestation of labor, Marx conceived it as
characteristic of a particular epoch of production: capitalism.
Diverging fundamentally from Marx, in the early part of the twentieth

century, most of the authors who addressed alienation considered it a
universal aspect of life. In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger
approached alienation in purely philosophical terms. The category he used for
his phenomenology of alienation was “fallenness” [Verfallen], that is, the
tendency of human existence to lose itself in the inauthenticity of the
surrounding world. Heidegger did not regard this fallenness as a “bad and
deplorable property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of human
culture might be able to rid themselves,” but rather as “an existential mode of
Being-in-the-world,” as a reality forming part of the fundamental dimension
of history.
After World War II, alienation became a recurrent theme — both in

philosophy and in literature — under the influence of French existentialism.
But it was identified with a diffuse discontent of man in society, a split
between human individuality and the world of experience, an
insurmountable condition humaine. Most existentialist philosophers did not
propose a social origin for alienation, but saw it as inevitably bound up with
all “facticity” (no doubt the failure of the Soviet experience favored such a
view) and human otherness. Marx had helped to develop a critique of human
subjugation in capitalist relations of production. The existentialists, by
contrast, sought to absorb those parts of Marx’s work that they thought useful
for their own approach, but in a merely philosophical discussion lacking any
specific historical account.
Diverging from Marx, in the early part of the twentieth century, most authors
who addressed alienation considered it a universal aspect of life.
For Herbert Marcuse, like the existentialists, alienation was associated with
objectification as such, rather than with a particular condition under
capitalism. In Eros and Civilization (1955), he distanced himself from Marx,
arguing that human emancipation could only be achieved with the abolition —
not the liberation — of labor and with the affirmation of the libido and play in
social relations. Marcuse ultimately opposed technological domination in
general, losing the historical specificity that tied alienation to capitalist
relations of production, and his reflections on social change were so
pessimistic as to often include the working class among the subjects that
operated in defense of the system.
The Irresistibility of Theories of Alienation

Adecade after Marcuse’s intervention, the term alienation entered the
vocabulary of North American sociology. Mainstream sociology treated it as a
problem of the individual human being, not of social relations, and the search
for solutions centered on the capacity of individuals to adjust to the existing
order rather than on collective practices to change society. This major shift of
approach ultimately downgraded analysis of historical-social factors. Whereas
in the Marxist tradition, the concept of alienation had contributed to some of
the sharpest criticisms of the capitalist mode of production, its
institutionalization in the realm of sociology reduced it to a phenomenon of
individual maladjustment to social norms. These interpretations have
contributed to a theoretical impoverishment of the discourse of alienation,
which — far from a complex phenomenon related to man’s work activity —
became, for some sociologists, a positive phenomenon, a means of expressing
creativity. In this form, the category of alienation was diluted to the point of
being virtually meaningless.
“Alienation’s institutionalization in the realm of sociology reduced it to a
phenomenon of individual maladjustment to social norms.”
In the same period, the category of alienation found its way into
psychoanalysis, where Erich Fromm used it to try to build a bridge to
Marxism. For Fromm, however, the emphasis was on subjectivity, and his
notion of alienation, summarized in The Sane Society (1955) as “a mode of
experience in which the individual experiences himself as alien,” remained
too narrowly focused on the individual. Fromm’s account of Marx’s concept
based itself exclusively on the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and
sidelined the role of alienated labor in Marx’s thought. This lacuna prevented
Fromm from giving due weight to objective alienation (that of the worker in
the labor process and in relation to the labor product).
In the 1960s, theories of alienation came into fashion and the concept seemed
to express the spirit of the age to perfection. In Guy Debord’s The Society of
the Spectacle (1967), alienation theory linked up with the critique of
immaterial production: “with the ‘second industrial revolution,’ alienated
consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated
production.” In The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), Jean
Baudrillard distanced himself from the Marxist focus on the centrality of
production and identified consumption as the primary factor in modern
society. The growth of advertising and opinion polls had created spurious
needs and mass consensus in an “age of consumption” and “radical
alienation.”
The popularization of the term, however, along with its indiscriminate

application, created a profound conceptual ambiguity. Within the space of a
few years, alienation had been transformed to designate nearly anything on the
spectrum of human unhappiness; it had become so all-encompassing that it
generated the belief that it could never be modified.
With hundreds of books and articles being published on the topic around the
world, it had become the age of alienation tout court. Authors from various
political backgrounds and academic disciplines identified its causes as
commodification, overspecialization, anomie, bureaucratization, conformism,
consumerism, loss of a sense of self amid new technologies, personal
isolation, apathy, social or ethnic marginalization, and environmental
pollution. The debate became even more paradoxical in the North American
academic context, where the concept of alienation underwent a veritable
distortion and ended up being used by defenders of the very social classes
against which it had for so long been directed.
Alienation According to Karl Marx

The Grundrisse, written in 1857–58, provides Marx’s best account of the
theme of alienation, though it remained unpublished even in Germany until
1939. When the text was eventually translated into European and Asian
languages from the late 1960s, including its English-language publication in
1973, scholars focused more of their attention on the way Marx
conceptualized alienation in his mature writings. The Grundrisse’s account
recalled the analyses of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 but was enriched by a much greater understanding of economic
categories and by a more rigorous social analysis. In the Grundrisse, Marx
more than once used the term “alienation” and argued that in capitalism
the general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for
each individual — their mutual interconnection — appears as something alien to them,
autonomous as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is
transformed into a social relation between things; personal capacity into objective
wealth.
The Grundrisse was not the only incomplete text of Marx’s maturity to feature

an account of alienation. Five years after it was composed, Capital, Volume 1:
Book 1, Chapter VI, unpublished (1863–64) brought the economic and
political analyses of alienation more closely together. “The rule of the
capitalist over the worker,” Marx wrote, “is the rule of things over human
beings, of dead labor over the living, of the product over the producer.” In
capitalist society, by virtue of “the transposition of the social productivity of
labor into the material attributes of capital,” there is a veritable
“personification of things and reification of persons,” creating the appearance
that “the material conditions of labor are not subject to the worker, but he to
them.”
Marx gave a similar account — much more elaborated than the one provided
in his early philosophical writings — in a famous section of Capital: “The
Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.” For Marx, in capitalist society,
relations among people appear not “as direct social relations between persons .
. . but rather as material relations between persons and social relations
between things.” This phenomenon is what he called “the fetishism which
attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as
commodities and is therefore inseparable from the production of
commodities.” Commodity fetishism did not replace the alienation of his early
writings. In bourgeois society, Marx held, human qualities and relations turn
into qualities and relations among things. This theory of what Lukács would
call reification illustrated this phenomenon from the point of view of human
relations, while the concept of fetishism treated it in relation to commodities.
“In bourgeois society, Marx held, human qualities and relations turn into
qualities and relations among things.”
The eventual diffusion of the mature Marx’s writing on alienation paved the
way for a departure from mainstream sociology and psychology’s
conceptualization of the phenomenon. Marx’s account of alienation was
geared to its overcoming in practice — to the political action of social
movements, parties, and trade unions to change the working and living
conditions of the working class. The publication of what — after
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in the 1930s — may be
thought of as the “second generation” of Marx’s writings on alienation
therefore provided not only a coherent theoretical basis for new studies of
alienation, but above all an anti-capitalist ideological platform for the
extraordinary political and social movements that exploded in the world
during those years. Alienation went beyond the books of philosophers and the
lecture halls of universities. It took to the streets and the space of workers’
struggles and became a critique of bourgeois society in general.
Since the 1980s, the world of labor has suffered an epochal defeat, the global
economic system is more exploitative than ever, and the Left is still in the
midst of a deep crisis. Of course, Marx cannot give an answer to many
contemporary problems, but he does pinpoint the essential questions. In a
society dominated by the free market and competition among individuals,
Marx’s account of alienation continues to provide an indispensable critical
tool for both understanding and criticizing capitalism today.
Marcello Mustohas recently published an anthology of Marx’s writings on

alienation, with an extended introduction which has been adapted here.
Neoliberalism Renders Us
Powerless — and Blames Us for
It
BY
MATT MCMANUS
As the 1 percent internalized the sense that they alone were
responsible for their success, so too was everyone else made
to feel like the cause of their own failure. This formula was
baked into the neoliberal philosophy from the beginning.
Neoliberalism was conceived as a fundamentally moral project to make the world safer
for property while fashioning individuals into entrepreneurs of the self. (Etienne
Girardet / Unsplash)
Editors
Jeremy Corbyn
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Michael Stipe
Review of Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of
Uselessness by Neil Vallelly (Goldsmiths Press, 2021)
There are few things more awful than feeling disposable.
When Joseph De Maistre described the French Revolutionaries as satanic and

destructive, he at least granted them the dignity of making an impact. José
Gasset might have been wary of the “revolt of the masses” of mediocre people
against the aristocracy, but occasionally expressed admiration for the
permanence and sweep of their uprising.
But when the proto-neoliberal Ludwig von Mises wrote to Ayn Rand, who
herself dismissed the majority of the human race as mediocre at best and
“second handers” at worst, he made no bones about it. Most people were
“inferior” and owed any and all improvements in their lot to the “effort of men
who are better than you.”
What makes this particular brand of aristocratic disdain so inherently nihilistic

and ugly is precisely that sentiment that most people don’t lead lives that are
worth much of anything. We serve as replaceable forms of human capital, put
to work by the handful of exceptional individuals who actually know what we
should doing with our lives, before we die and the next generation takes our
place.
To invoke the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his Wasted Lives: Modernity

and Its Outcasts, the paradigmatic object of the neoliberal era is trash. The
mass of “inferior” people serve their function, and when used up get chucked
away. How else can one describe the remarkable moments during the
pandemic when, faced with the possibilities of economic downturn or sending
workers to contract the virus and die, plenty on the Right signaled their
enthusiasm for the latter?
Neil Vallelly’s superb new book Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the

Production of Uselessness is a polemic against the emptiness of the neoliberal
era. It examines both its ideological roots, history, and political culture.
Deeply inspired by the similarly grim Mark Fisher (of Capitalist

Realism fame), the book is often sobering and even melancholic. Indeed in
some of its more scathing passages, Futilitarianism reads like the academic
equivalent of a primal scream against the injustice and alienation of the
futilitarian era. But this passion drives and deepens Vallelly’s analysis, and
the book will no doubt be welcomed by all of us who seek a better alternative
to the despair of neoliberalism in the age of COVID-19.
Utilitarianism and Capitalism

Vallelly locates the roots of neoliberalism in the moral and political theory of
Utilitarianism, which has long antecedents, but was generally given
systematic form by the English polymath Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Bentham began his intellectual career with a scathing denunciation of English

common law, which he saw as irredeemably traditionalist and littered with
irrational prejudices. While in hindsight progressives should actually agree
with many of his criticisms, Bentham already displayed a worrying tendency
to boil things down to a very basic set of moral and psychological principles,
that struggled to account for historical and human complexities. This was best
reflected in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation when
Bentham proclaimed, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of
two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out
what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”
Since then, for all his insistence on its rationalistic simplicity, many have
complained about deep tensions in Bentham’s position. Was he making a
psychological claim about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain
simply being fundamental human motivations, a moral claim about how
they should be the fundamental human motivations, or both? But Bentham
was convinced of the power of his argument, and claimed that the best moral
and political system would be one dedicated to achieving the greatest
happiness for the greatest number of people, as determined through a kind of
felicific calculus.
As Vallelly points out, the most obvious tension in Bentham’s utilitarianism is

between its individualism and concern with “a form of wellbeing that extends
beyond the individual. Utilitarianism, after all, intends to maximise utility for
the greatest amount of people, with, theoretically, no individual’s happiness
prioritized over another’s.” Put another way, if it is psychologically true that
each individual is egoistically motivated by the pursuit of pleasure for herself,
how do we move from there to a moral argument that she should put her
desires aside if that would secure greater happiness for others?
The later philosopher Henry Sidgwick described this as the enduring

inconsistency between “rational hedonism” and “rational benevolence,” or as
it’s sometimes called “psychological” vs “ethical” hedonism. It was
sufficiently thorny that Sidgwick labeled it the “profoundest problem in
ethics.”
For many capitalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
solution lay not in moral or political philosophy but economic theory —
which nonetheless had a quasi-utilitarian ethos. Importing the evolutionary
idea of the market as a mechanism that had emerged over time to maximize
utility, figures like Francis Edgeworth argued that a society where individuals
competed with one another in the production and sale of goods would
maximize utility over time. This is because capitalist firms would be
incentivized to gratify the greatest number of human needs, while individual
consumers would be free to consume whatever goods gave them the highest
levels of pleasure.
Despite the appeal of this synthesis of utilitarianism and capitalism, it was
never uncontroversial. In the twentieth century, Vallelly observes, there was a
climatic struggle between socially minded utilitarians, mostly inspired by J.
M. Keynes, and the increasingly strident neoliberal economists. For a while,
the socially minded utilitarians were successful, and largely justified the
creation of extensive welfare states on the grounds that a more even
distribution of goods and services would make people happier and prevent
needless suffering.
But as Vallelly points out, it was not to last.“The neoliberals won the long
game,” he writes. “The economic stagnation and political crises of 1970s
crippled Keynesian logic. In its place, [Friedrich] Hayek and the neoliberal
cabal of the Chicago School of Economics chewed the ear of sympathetic
politicians in the US, UK, and further afield.”
Neoliberal Futilitarianism
There is a clear sense in which neoliberalism constitutes a continuation of this
utilitarian tradition, for instance by retaining an emphasis on utility
maximization. But Vallelly rightly points out that neoliberal theory and
practice stripped utilitarianism of whatever social conscience it had, and
refocused its energies entirely on remaking the individual into a form of social
capital totally beholden to market forces and increasingly denied even a
minimally responsive state for protection.
What was left of utilitarianism was a belief that “individual choice and
flexibility” were integral features of the market economy. Moreover, linked to
this reconsideration of utility was a reconceptualization of freedom as nothing
more than these kinds of consumer choices and flexible capitalist conditions.
Neoliberals felt that by encasing the market from democratic pressures and
disciplining the population by gutting agency-enhancing social programs, the
narrow freedoms remaining to individuals — to compete and consume in the
market — would lead them to become immeasurably more productive, often
by necessity in a sink or swim world.
Jessica Whyte and Wendy Brown are two of the most important theoretical
influences on Futilitarianism, and rightly so. They warn us to avoid
understanding this turn along purely economistic lines. This has long been a
favored rhetorical trope of neoliberal politicians, who often insisted they were
operating beyond ideology, or simply letting the natural “laws” of the market
run their course. In fact, neoliberalism from the beginning was conceived as a
fundamentally moral project to make the world safer for property while
fashioning individuals into entrepreneurs of the self.
This is sometimes made comically explicit, as in Tom Peter’s 1997 article

for Fast Company “The Brand Called You,” which urges people to stop
thinking of themselves as complete persons or even as workers clocking in
and out. Instead we were literally a brand that needed be invested in,
marketed, and adapted to new circumstances.
The dark side to this is the responsibilization of the individual for all their
problems, even those that don’t fall under their control. Worried about global
warming? Don’t blame big oil, think of how often you tossed a can into the
trash rather than recycle. Can’t get insurance or pay your medical bills?
Consider cutting back on alcohol and bad food to save money and improve
your health. The result was not just a depoliticization of life, but a dynamic of
disempowerment through futility. As the 1 percent internalized the sense that
they alone were responsible for their success, so too was everyone else made
to feel like the cause of their own failure.
This leads to the sense of futility and emptiness Vallelly powerfully diagnoses
as emblematic of neoliberal capitalism. Communities and political movements
are disaggregated into atomized individuals. They are paradoxically made to
feel that relentless but narrow self-improvement, the pursuit of wealth, power,
and status within the system is all that matters, and that they are powerless to
change that same system.
In a sense neoliberalism is defined by what Hannah Arendt artfully called a

kind of impotent bigness, in which people have enough agency to satisfy their
pleasures but but not enough to reclaim the world around them. This is
reflected in what Vallelly calls the “semi-futility” of the culture around us,
which is for the first time stamped by a sense of permanent hopelessness in
the face of its own alienation.
Where classical Marxists once believed in the inexorable historical arrival of a

better tomorrow, one of the most alienating features of neoliberalism is how it
naturalizes history out of existence. Since there is “no alternative” to the
world as it is, aesthetics becomes the endless recycling of cultural images and
symbols from the past, a pastiche of postmodern nostalgia for a time where
people could actually make a difference. Even language becomes increasingly
incapable of bearing the gravitas of meaning we need it to, as communication
is flattened by digital discourse and the rich texture of the world becomes
liquidated into two hundred eighty digestible characters.
Politics Against Futility

I’m not convinced Vallelly has truly done justice to the utilitarian tradition,
which as he grudgingly acknowledges often had a more radical side than
comes to the fore in Futilitarianism. Bentham himself may have been an
awkward guy with a bad habit of saying “shut up and calculate.” But he was
also an early proponent of political democracy, women’s equality, and animal
rights. This flows quite organically from the egalitarian ethos at the basis of
utilitarianism; after all, each is to count as one, and no one as more than one.
Bentham’s successor J. S. Mill innovated on Bentham in important ways that

Vallelly skips past too quickly, and even embraced an explicitly
socialist politics in the last decades of his life. Indeed Mill’s denunciation of
capitalism and moralistic responsibilization in his pamphlet Socialism echoes
many of the arguments in Futilitarianism. And indeed Mill’s expressive
individualism and insistence that people develop many sides of their nature
through experiments in living sits very uncomfortably within the monological
mania of neoliberal markets.
Another gap which bears addressing is the link between neoliberalism and the
broader political right, which receives scant attention in Futilitarianism. We
must not get into the habit of assuming that all forms of reaction and defenses
of inequality are the same, which is the conceptual twin of assuming that any
and all responses to a phenomena like neoliberalism are radical.
Trumpism, or what I’ve called “post-modern conservatism,” is indelibly

stamped by the neoliberal era, particularly its defining division of the world
into deserving winners and pathetic losers. But it’s also a reaction to
neoliberalism that channels the resentment of the powerful against the
increasingly demanding weak in novel ways. This has included the nostalgic
appeal to pre-neoliberal symbols and romantic ideas, such as the nation and
the conservative religious community, coupled with a thin but real attack on
market society’s permissiveness and decadence. Vallelly’s argument would be
strengthened by addressing these issues in some depth.
But these are small complaints in light of the book’s great

virtues. Futilitarianism is a rare book that speaks to the reader on both a
personal and intellectual level. We are living in a futilitarian world, and
Vallelly powerfully reminds us that we deserve far, far better.
Tomorrow, the Chilean Left Has

to Do More Than Stop the Far
Right
BY
RENÉ ROJAS
Despite the Right’s surprisingly strong showing in Chile’s
first-round elections, socialist Gabriel Boric is still favored
to win the presidency tomorrow. But the Left needs to be
laser focused on a broad working-class agenda to fully roll
back neoliberalism.
Chilean presidential candidate Gabriel Boric, from the Apruebo Dignidad coalition,
gestures during his closing campaign rally in Santiago on December 16, 2021.
(MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images)
Editors
Jeremy Corbyn
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Michael Stipe
Progressives and democrats everywhere are reeling from the results of last
month’s election in Chile. Up and down the narrow Andean country and far
beyond, many are holding their breath in anticipation of Sunday’s runoff
election results. After the first-place finish by the hard-right José Antoni Kast,
many are wondering how a pro-Pinochet reactionary could beat out the new
left in a society that just two years earlier exploded in a rebellion against
decades of neoliberalism.
The country in which 80 percent of voters recently chose to rewrite the

constitution just saw Kast, an apologist for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship
who repudiated the demands of the upheaval and campaigned against the
Constituent Assembly, surpass the candidate who embodies comprehensive
reforms and the fight for a new social democratic charter. Fears of a return to
fascism have overtaken the hopes spawned by the rebellion and the
constituent process. Has Chile flipped from an October of anti-neoliberal
insurgency to a November of authoritarian pro-market continuity?
Coming on the heels of a decade-long cycle of mass protest against

neoliberalism, the turnaround has stunned observers and activists. To make
sense of Kast’s first-round victory, the Left must reckon with a spate of
blunders that turned key fractions of the electorate in favor of reactionary
solutions to the ravages of neoliberalism. A clear grasp of Chile’s abrupt
reversal from mass mobilization and social democratic refoundation to
reactionary counterreform also sheds light on the wider Latin American
phenomenon of surging revanchism.
Still, a dose of sobriety is in order. Not all is lost in Chile. Although Kast’s
surge threatens the consolidation of a new left and its pursuit of radical
reform, his first-round win has not shelved Chile’s ongoing anti-neoliberal
rebellion. Despite the election’s troubling results, postmortems for the
country’s democratic revolution are still premature.
The Numbers
Kast’s breakout run edged out the other political force emerging from Chile’s
transformed political circumstances — the left alliance between the Frente
Amplio and the Communist Party. Both his newly minted retrograde Christian
Social Front (FSC) and the Left’s Apruebo Dignidad (For Dignity coalition, or
AD) rose from the ruins of the dying post-authoritarian neoliberal regime’s
party system.
At the same time, both (and AD in particular) were hampered by growing

disillusion with transformations underway, reflected in rock-bottom voter
turnout. While these two polarized blocs are now the country’s ascendant
camps, the election revealed the fluidity of the country’s ongoing partisan
reconfiguration as well as the nature of the broader regime transformation
underway.
It is first useful to take note of the parties in terminal decline, welcome

evidence that the party system that ruled over the post-dictatorship market
order has disintegrated beyond repair. The main pillar of Chile’s democratic
neoliberalism, the center-left alliance controlled by the Socialist and Christian
Democratic parties, took a mere 11.5 percent of ballots. The same coalition
that won five of the seven elections held since the end of Pinochet’s rule —
including the first four — managed only 816,000 votes. This is just over half
the number it won in the first round in 2017, when its decomposition was well
underway. To put the collapse in historical perspective, the center left
received 3.85 million votes in the first post-transition elections and nearly 3.2
million first-round votes when Socialist Michelle Bachelet first became
president in 2006. In other words, Chile’s progressive neoliberals today retain
somewhere between one-fifth and one-fourth of their traditional electoral
base.
It is not just the center left’s presidential tickets that are disintegrating. Its
parliamentary slate was equally shredded. Whereas the coalition gained a
towering majority in the lower chamber in 1989 with 3.5 million votes, this
time it barely surpassed 1 million votes, winning under a quarter of the seats.
The Christian Democrats’ precipitous decline deserves special mention: the
party that dominated the 1990s transition, when it dominated the coalition
with its own forty representatives, has been reduced to eight seats, a showing
comparable to that of new fringe parties.
If Kast’s rise represents the unlikely consolidation of hard-right, law-and-order

populism, Apruebo Dignidad’s stagnation should be seen as the momentary
stalling of the new socialist politics that helped steer Chile’s radical reform
process.
The center right’s performance reveals a similar decline, albeit with a
paradoxical caveat. As anticipated, the coalition of Sebastián Piñera, the lame-
duck president irreparably battered by the 2019 rebellion, received only 13
percent of the vote. Cognizant of its evaporated credibility, his party ran an
unaffiliated bureaucrat, but the ploy fell flat. Whereas Piñera obtained just
over 3 million votes in the first round in 2009, a figure that fell to around 2.5
million by 2017, Sebastián Sichel placed fourth last week with only nine
hundred thousand ballots. The centrist candidate, who could not shake his
establishment credentials, became a liability for Chile’s right as his polling
began crashing in September. Far from buttressing his campaign, the
administration’s support was an albatross.
The crumbling center right, however, pulled off an implausible achievement.

Unlike the center left, whose decay is pervasive, the former Alianza, now
under the cereal-box name Chile Podemos Más (Chile Can Do More),
somehow stopped its parliamentary bleeding. While the coalition’s lower
house representation dropped from its seventy-two seats in 2017, it held firm
with fifty-three, over one-third of all seats. It fared even better in the upper
chamber, taking twelve of the twenty-seven spots up for grabs and thus
increasing its total from fifteen to twenty-four senators, just one shy of a
majority.
Yet even as the post-authoritarian regime’s right wing has managed to lodge
itself in a key power center of the state, the old order’s partisan pillars have
undeniably lost their supremacy. This was the first time that the dominant
coalitions failed either to win outright or to advance to runoffs.
Although the center right is in disarray, the Kast phenomenon improbably

shored up its most hard-line sectors. Kast’s sudden growth is as unexpected as
it is striking. Since before the great rebellion, the radical left had captured and
directed anti-neoliberal discontent, crowding out right-populist options. Now
Kast took 28 percent of votes after winning a mere 8 percent in the last
presidential elections. Indeed, until late September, he had not managed to
establish himself as a serious contender.
Last month, however, he began a rapid rise, going from the candidate of
roughly 10 percent to the preferred option of a quarter of polled voters.
Compared to 2017, his first-round votes expanded nearly fourfold, from
525,000 to 1,960,000. Kast’s abrupt success signifies the unanticipated
installation of a Bolsonaro-type right-wing politics in a country that, not long
ago, appeared to have foreclosed such reactionary paths.
Kast, who as recently as 2014 was secretary general of Independent

Democratic Union (UDI), the center-right coalition’s hard-authoritarian party,
founded the Partido Republicano in 2018 as a vehicle for his personal
ambitions as well as for the harsh current of extreme conservatism he
promotes. Steeped in hierarchical Catholicism, he formed the FSC with the
Partido Conservador Cristiano (Conservative Christian Party, or PCC), a
fringe outfit aiming to resurrect the most regressive strands of Chile’s long-
defunct oligarchic Partido Nacional of president Arturo Alessandri (1958–
1964). Though the ultra-fundamentalist PCC failed to break half of 1 percent
in the constituent elections, the FSC now placed fifteen representatives, just
shy of one-tenth of all delegates, in the lower house.
Presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, who led in first in the first-round
contest, looks on during a debate organized by the Chilean Business Association
on December 3, 2021, in Santiago, Chile. (Sebastián Vivallo Oñate / Agencia
Makro / Getty Images)
Besides controlling its own substantial bloc in Congress, Chile’s new
conservatism is poised to assemble a parliamentary majority: combining the
surviving center right now under its spell with the FSC, the hard right boasts
68 of 155 seats. It should not take much for this reactionary coalition in the
making to find ten additional votes.
On the other end of the spectrum, AD’s candidate, Gabriel Boric, obtained
what might otherwise have been a promising 26 percent of votes. Although
less compressed than Kast’s, his rise was similarly surprising. After the new
left’s primary victory in mid-July, polling numbers for Boric — a former
student-movement leader and key founder of Frente Amplio — shot up from
under 5 percent to somewhere between 25 and 30 percent just two weeks
before the election. Combined with a relatively impressive turnout in the AD
primary, which contrasted with listless participation in the center right’s
primary and generalized dysfunction in the center-left candidate selection
process, Boric’s polling raised seductive prospects.
Unfortunately for AD and the country’s enthused new left activists, his
campaign stagnated right when Kast surged. After its early October high
point, support for Boric plateaued and was then abruptly overtaken by pro-
Kast preferences. The encouraging 1.75 million votes cast in the left alliance’s
primary turned out to be the ceiling rather than the floor.
The new left’s stagnation can also be measured over a longer time frame.
Whereas Kast virtually quadrupled his vote since 2017, the FA’s vote, even
with added Communist backing, grew by a mere third. While Kast activated
new voters, AD, after tapping out its progressive base, failed to reach potential
voters from other parties and the alienated electorate.
Yet if AD fell short of the unrealistic expectation of a commanding first-round

win, Chile’s new left unequivocally improved its overall standing. In a
historic achievement, Communists elected two senators, the first time
since Salvador Allende’s government that the party has broken into the upper
house. The left alliance established a far stronger position in the lower
chamber. If, as expected, three renegade Dignidad Ahora representatives led
by Pamela Jiles, a former FA ally turned toxic prima donna, vote with AD, it
will have effectively doubled its congressional stature.
Not only has the left coalition displaced the center left as the second force in
parliament; its near certain gravitational pull on two Green and thirteen
Socialist representatives will hand it fifty-five seats, over one-third of the
total. If Kast’s rise represents the unlikely consolidation of hard-right, law-
and-order populism, AD’s stagnation should be seen as the momentary
stalling of the new socialist politics that helped steer Chile’s radical reform
process.
Popular Disaffection
Acomplete review of the election results must address two additional trends.
They are sides of the same coin of popular disaffection that neither the cycle
of rebellion nor the growth of AD has been able to curtail. On one hand was
the surprise showing by absentee candidate Franco Parisi, who came in third
with one-eighth of ballots cast. Barred from campaigning in Chile, Parisi is a
quack academic who rejects the left-right distinction and is Chile’s closest
analogue to Andrew Yang. Although he established himself as a
commonsense “little guy” entrepreneurial candidate and polled respectably for
months, Parisi shocked observers. Having taken over the fringe Partido de la
Gente (People’s Party), he gained particular traction with his brand of do-it-
yourself populism in Chile’s northern mining districts, coming away with six
lower house seats.
A wide-angle view dispels the notion of a mighty pro-Kast electoral swell. It also
renders the new left’s performance that much more disappointing.
Partido de la Gente easily surpassed another antiestablishment candidate
whose perennial runs have turned him into an insider in the eyes of many
Chileans: Marco Enriquez-Ominami, known as MEO. The Parisi revelation
reflects the electorate’s deep alienation. It will give his voters and his new
caucus a decisive swing influence, positioning Parisi as a potential kingmaker
in the runoffs and beyond.
A related phenomenon was the alarming amount of voter demobilization. The

same share of voters sat out this election as in the record low 2017 contest. In
absolute terms, however, abstention grew from 7.65 million to nearly 8
million.
Depressed turnout appears at odds with both the country’s massive struggle
for regime change and the polarization of these elections. But after the
constituent elections of a year ago barely registered an uptick in voter
participation, most analysts had forecasted it. Chile’s rock-bottom turnout
comprises the overwhelming strand of the same voter disaffection fueling the
Parisi phenomenon. Its extensiveness helps place all candidates’ performances
in their proper measure.
Neither of the top contenders’ votes matched even a quarter of the part of the
electorate that sat out the election. In fact, when considering all registered
voters, Kast and Boric came away with scant 13 and 12 percent of their vote,
respectively. This wide-angle view dispels the notion of a mighty pro-Kast
electoral swell. It also renders the new left’s performance that much more
disappointing; after Chile’s late 2019 generalized upheaval, AD failed to
convince more than one in nine voters that the Left could deliver longed for
changes.
In sum, even while Kast might have the advantage, Parisi could determine the
outcome. And though Boric and AD have reshaped Chilean politics, all
partisan forces, not just those in irreversible decay, are faltering.
The candidate that manages to appeal to demoralized working Chileans will

become president. More importantly, and looking beyond this election, the
Left must find a way to revive anti-neoliberal rebellion if it is to complete
Chile’s democratic revolution. Unfortunately, for now, Chile’s new radicals
have sapped mass insurgency, dulling workers’ and the poor’s commitment to
radical change and opening the window for Kast.
Behind the Numbers

To understand Chile’s troubling election results, one must grasp how Chile’s
rising new left lost the initiative to Kast’s social revanchism. The main cause
of the reversal was the shift in popular perception of AD and the broader left.
Since the Constituent Assembly’s inauguration, sections of Chile’s working

masses went from viewing radicals as in sync with the rebellion and its
demands to feeling they were a distant force incapable of addressing people’s
most pressing material concerns. Radicals’ neglect of core mass grievances
and their apparent prioritizing of cultural feuds, on the one hand, and defense
of senseless chaos, on the other, fueled disappointment and resentment. It not
only turned many off; it had the more dangerous effect of turning pivotal
segments toward reactionary solutions. Simply stated, Chile’s new left failed
to campaign as the political arm of the rebellion.
That AD and the Left alienated voters in favor of Kast is even more
confounding given that he is not a typical populist who campaigned on anti-
elite sentiment and bread-and-butter appeals. Although Kast pitched himself
as antiestablishment, he campaigned as a conservative restorationist,
promising to return Chile to an era of poster-child neoliberal growth as well as
traditional values of family and order. In fact, as the Panama Papers revealed,
he hid millions in offshore tax havens, demonstrably belying any economic
populist orientation. Even so, he catapulted into the lead.
Many on the Left claim that Kast overtook AD owing to the left coalition’s
centrist shift in combination with an effective social media fearmongering
campaign. Boric is said to have bled support as he moderated his proposals,
adopting elements of fiscal conservatism, harder stances on immigration, and
eleventh-hour tough-on-crime positions that abandoned protesters detained
since the rebellion. But AD’s appeals to centrists were expected in such a
polarized election, and it likely netted votes.
Leftist politics leading up to the elections disappointed working Chileans, but

for the almost opposite reasons. Leftists inside and outside of AD struck many
as being too radical, pointlessly out of touch with class-wide demands.
The damaging impact of insurgents’ “radicalism” is reflected in the inverse

relationship between the notoriety of the Left’s moralistic anti-oppression
politics and Boric’s polling numbers. Before the Constituent Assembly
opened, Boric’s candidacy remained a pipe dream. But after the convention’s
inauguration and his success in AD’s primaries during the first half of July,
popular hopes for meaningful reforms began propelling his campaign. Within
two months, his support climbed from just 6 percent to at least a quarter of
voters.
Beginning around mid-August, however, the most visible section of the
assembly’s left wing devolved into strident sectarianism and recrimination,
repelling swaths of working-class voters. Since the worst of the radical left’s
implosion, Boric began a steady decline that his campaign could not halt. By
the beginning of November, reported preference for the AD candidate fell
back to 20 percent, and Kast had taken the lead.
The reasons are not hard to decipher. Since the 2019 rebellion, Chileans have
been unequivocal in their demands. The country erupted against poverty
wages, particularly for the upward of two-fifths working in the informal
sector; against a privatized retirement system that condemns most retirees to
undignified old age; and against apartheid-like market health and education
systems. COVID aggravated the material troubles of the low-income Chileans
who make up the majority of the population. In fact, over half of all
workers earned insufficient income in 2020 to keep their families above the
official (and absurdly stingy) poverty line. A year into the pandemic, almost
30 percent of poor Chileans lacked work, while over three-quarters reported
being unable to meet their most basic needs.
Sections of Chile’s working masses went from viewing radicals as in sync with
the rebellion and its demands to feeling they were a distant force incapable of
addressing people’s most pressing material concerns.
As material uncertainty worsened for the laboring masses, fear of public
safety and crime also rose. Whereas a quarter of Chileans listed crime as a top
concern immediately after the rebellion, by August of this year, over two-
fifths did so, elevating it to the country’s number-one perceived problem.
Precisely when circumstances demanded that surging radicals take charge,

their actions and rhetoric, now at center stage, increasingly lost relevance.
Since the constituent plebiscite and elections, an unmistakable popular

mandate took shape: Chileans once again listed quality, free universal health
care, free public education, and dignified pensions as the leading social rights
for delegates to enshrine in the new charter. As important as gender equality
(4.7 percent), environmental justice (4.2), indigenous (3.0) and immigrant
rights (1.3) are for working Chileans, these did not figure as key priorities
given the social and employment emergency at hand. It is not that workers and
the poor are hostile to these other concerns; more accurately, they desire these
sectional rights to be addressed within a program of universal guarantees.
The Left squandered the opportunity to press a program relentlessly showing

impoverished workers that its policies focused on and aimed to resolve these
core needs. As working Chileans’ material and physical insecurity
deteriorated, their contempt for the political class intensified. Also in
August, four-fifths insisted the economy was rigged in favor of the rich and
powerful, while nearly 85 percent of respondents declared that parties and
politicians dismissed ordinary people like them and that experts were
oblivious to their living conditions. During the crucial months between the
Constituent Assembly’s inauguration and the elections, however, mistrust of
and disdain for establishment politics spread to Chile’s new left. According to
some polls, only a quarter preserved any hope in the convention. Soon, early
excitement for Boric and the Aprueblo Dignidad campaign began to wane.
With the pandemic raging amid inadequate public health infrastructure,

unemployment reaching its highest level in decades, and women in particular
squeezed out of the labor market and facing intensified dependence on
strained male wage earners, radicals seemed to prioritize symbolic gestures of
cultural inclusion and histrionic defenses of marginality. They pursued what
landed as alien moralizing, and many became embroiled in morally
questionable disputes.
Supporters of Chilean presidential candidate Gabriel Boric rally in Santiago on
Thursday ahead of the presidential runoff election. (Marcelo Hernandez / Getty
Images)
Whether on the campaign trail or in the Constituent Assembly, some on the
Left seemed almost oblivious to the decline of ordinary Chileans’ material and
physical security. The new left’s perceived neglect of the rebellion’s universal
planks disappointed poor and working Chileans demanding solutions to the
inequality that precipitated the rebellion and drove a huge majority to vote for
a new constitution.
Even though Boric’s platform was strong on labor rights and unionization,
taxing Chile’s millionaires, guaranteed social provision, and expanded public
goods, his campaign reflected the intersectional handwringing so prevalent
among student radicals and mid-level professionals. When Kast’s candidacy
began its ascent, AD denunciations of his retrograde misogyny, xenophobia,
heteronormativity, and overall punitiveness became all-consuming. Standing
firm against these dangers is ethically and strategically correct. But Chile’s
new radicals failed to integrate these nonnegotiable stances into universalist
platforms. Their campaign could have explained how broad programs best
address more specific forms of inequality and injustice. Instead, they
underscored cultural and identity inclusion at the expense of a class-wide
materialist program. On this front, Apruebo Dignidad
undoubtedly resembled the traditional center right and center left.
In short, the Left’s shift in tone and discourse contributed centrally to Kast’s
late boost. Working Chileans had already discarded the old regime’s
establishment parties; now their disillusion with the radical alternative drove
the most disaffected to look elsewhere for solutions. Many considered the
outsider Parisi, and still more decided to give Kast a shot.
As the center right’s candidate sank, Kast predictably picked up support. Once

he emerged as the Right’s candidate, backing from those who opposed a new
constitution — Chile’s hard-right, pro-dictatorship sectors — was wrapped
up. His core is rooted in Chile’s small-business owners and conservative
professionals. They either always preferred free-market conservatism or now,
surrounded by unrest, prioritized a restoration of order to preserve their class
privileges.
But Kast needed additional votes to secure a spot in the runoff. Tellingly, just
three months before the elections, most Chileans still rejected his hard-line
authoritarianism. In August, he scored an approval rating of just 16 percent
and a huge 61 percent disapproval rating. Within a month, however, up to a
quarter of Chileans predicted he would become president.
In the end, he flipped just enough frustrated voters to prevail. Ironically, the
extra backing for the pro-Pinochet reactionary, a nontrivial 16 percent, came
from those who only a year prior voted to bury the military’s constitution.
Chile’s new left failed to campaign as the political arm of the rebellion.
Kast’s law-and-order, anti-immigrant, traditional family, and the MAGA-like
“return Chile to its market miracle day” promises resonated against the Left’s
neglect of class-wide material concerns. His appeals swayed pockets of
Chile’s popular sectors that had supported, and perhaps even participated in,
the rebellion. They come from depressed provincial towns ignored by the
capital’s managerial layers; from neighborhoods plagued by rapidly rising
crime; and from zones with scarce employment and inadequate resources that
have been strained by chaotically managed immigration. Given radicals’
failure to hammer home a program offering social and physical safety for
everyone discarded by thirty years of neoliberalism, trying the candidate who
loudly vowed to tackle them directly was not irrational.
This second-preference reasoning — rather than hate-filled WhatsApp

messages and fake-news-driven manipulation, as some liberals and leftists
have emphasized — explains Kast’s successful turnaround. Kast did prey on
hysterical fears and scapegoating, but these disturbing sentiments operated
along rational concerns for pressing material needs.
Fear of crime, for instance, is not a fabrication. Although Chile exhibits low
homicide rates compared with most Latin American societies, murders
increased by nearly 30 percent from 2019, with those committed with firearms
rising over 40 percent. And working Chileans have suffered spikes in violent
crime, particularly in densely populated urban centers. In the years leading up
to the rebellion, aggravated robberies in the working-class township of
Estación Central soared by 25 percent to 1,235 per 100,000 residents. (By
comparison, 2020 robbery rates in New York City, Chicago, and Baltimore
stand at roughly 150, 350, and 1000, respectively.)
A year ago, AD elected three of the seven constituents allotted to Estación

Central’s district, with radical autonomists electing two more and the Right
barely sneaking in with one. Now the district partially flipped, as UDI won
two seats and Kast’s FSC picked up another. In what should be a left
stronghold, Kast took over a quarter of votes. The reason Kast was able to
exploit anti-crime hysteria is that crime is real, and Chile’s new left offered no
convincing policies for addressing it. The new left’s ambivalence toward or
outright neglect of working people’s security concerns lent credibility to the
fallacy that the Left wantonly contributes to violence.
In the absence of reliable universal protections, anxiety around immigration

similarly translated into support for Kast. As the wealthiest country in Latin
America, Chile has received growing numbers of foreigners since the late
1990s. After earlier Peruvian mass migration, waves of Haitian, Colombian,
and Venezuelan migrants have arrived in Chile since the early 2010s. Until
recently, expanding entry rates had not fueled significant xenophobic
backlash. In December 2018, even after five years of sluggish growth, two-
thirds of Chileans either valued or were neutral about immigrants’
contributions; only 30 percent evaluated them negatively. But by February of
this year, during the worst of the crisis, public opinion had flipped, with 60
percent reporting immigration was bad for the country. Chileans abruptly lost
regard for immigrants’ well-being and increasingly demanded stricter border
surveillance. Although clamping down on migrant flows into the country still
ranked far below poverty and inequality, suddenly Chile ranked first among
countries anxious over immigration control.
The Left always has to stand resolutely against xenophobia, of course. But
concern over immigration favored Kast due to the fact that the Left failed to
drive home an alternative platform of universal protections that would
alleviate real economic anxieties and underscore the futility of scapegoating.
Competition over jobs and social expenditures associated with
growing migrant flows and encampments added to the dread of increasing
precariousness for workers.
Demonstrators are sprayed by security forces with a water cannon during a
protest against Chile’s government in Santiago on November 4, 2019. (Jeremias
Gonzalez/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The thuggish attacks against immigrants and the burning of their few
possessions two months before the election in the country’s north was
reprehensible, and most Chileans condemned it. But denunciations, pledges of
responsible policies, and appeals to tolerance coming from the Left and the
AD campaign did not reassure workers regarding their underlying
vulnerabilities, pushing some toward resentment. Indeed, residents from
towns unequipped to deal with immigration complained of the Left’s
remoteness. Under the false impression that Kast’s draconian message spoke
to their needs, voters gave him 30 percent pluralities in the two northernmost
regions.
The point here is not that the Left should stop defending immigrants, of course
— it’s that the Left has to offer a substantive working-class alternative,
beyond moral exhortations, to a status quo that drives some Chileans into the
hands of reaction.
Beyond the Numbers

As catastrophic as the first-round results appear, they do not overturn the
process of change underway in Chile. Although the Left suffered a setback,
with some popular sections defecting to a program that hampers mass
struggles for advancing social democracy, it was not defeated.
Accordingly, Chile’s anti-neoliberal revolution will be more prolonged and

difficult than hoped. After decades of a savage market order and evisceration
of radical political forces, it will take years to configure a partisan left that
matches and further promotes the significant working-class capacities
achieved of late. Regardless of who prevails in the runoffs, Chile’s anti-
neoliberal revolution faces daunting challenges.
While predictions are risky, Boric has emerged as the front-runner. Initially,
the electoral math alone appeared to give Kast an edge. Without significant
expansion in turnout — adding Sichel’s and Parisi’s voters, and with some
right-wing Christian Democrats added to the mix — the outcome would seem
tilted in Kast’s favor. Over the past two weeks, however, a gathering
alignment vowed to mobilize for Boric to ensure the defeat of Chile’s so-
called neofascism. Kast’s almost anachronistic anti-communist hysteria —
labelling the party that from 2013 to 2017 supported center-left neoliberals a
threat to capitalist civilization — helped consolidate a formidable alliance
between the fiercest defenders of market orthodoxy and staunch traditional
conservatives.
The surest route to Boric’s victory involves attracting alienated working and poor
sectors.
But pledges from the progressive-to-center spectrum, including an eventual
endorsement from independent senator Fabiola Campillai, combined with
scattered right-wing liberal votes, should hand Boric a win. The latest round
of polls, which have stood out for their accuracy, gave Boric up to a 10 point
advantage.
For many in his campaign, Boric’s success depends on a continued opening to

liberal progressives and the center. Since the first round, AD’s campaign has
incessantly proclaimed the fiscal unviability of Kast’s low-tax economic
blueprint and his attack on civil liberties. Following a parallel playbook, Kast
renounced egregious proposals like eliminating the Women’s Ministry
and condemned anti-trans rants by his party’s most contemptible
parliamentarian.
Intended for short-term gain, moderation might undermine the longer-term

strategies of Chile’s emerging rival blocs. The growth of Kast’s FSC, for
instance, requires severe rejection of market progressivism. Similarly, Boric’s
appeals to the center could become a hindrance. The surest route to AD
victory, after all, involves attracting alienated working and poor sectors.
Reactivating working-class Chileans who came out during the 2019 rebellion
is also indispensable for the mass mobilizations needed to revive the fight for
social and political refoundation.
Tomorrow’s election will be a snapshot referendum on Chile’s political

revolution. It is the most immediate and visible expression of deeper struggles
that will outlast the runoff. If polls are right and Kast loses, Chile’s
reconfigured right will hardly go home. It will wage a relentless campaign to
terminate the reform process underway. In carrying out its obstructionist
mission, it will continue to reinvent itself in Kast’s mold. Given the collapse
of republican neoliberalism, right-wingers will align with the country’s new
reactionary populism.
Chile’s peculiar hard-line restorationism has already secured powerful

positions. With a majority in the Senate cohering around it, Kast’s social
revanchism will likely push even harsher forms of xenophobia and
punitiveness that rely on both market and authoritarian coercion. Grasping
how vital his disciplinary law-and-order planks are for galvanizing the
hardening right, when pressed, Kast refused to disavow a proposal to set up
black sites to detain criminals and unruly activists.
While Kast and reactionary populism is well entrenched, it is unclear how far
it can expand and consolidate into a potential ruling force. Whether leading
sectors of business will rally behind Kast remains to be seen. He tied up
support among swaths of rural conservatives and small business owners, but
nothing yet indicates that he is the preference of Chile’s captains of capital.
Trucking companies lined up behind him, and particular interests fearing
reforms, such as a public gas distribution system and investments in public
railways, filled his campaign coffers. But these narrow sectoral concerns do
not, at least for the moment, hold decisive weight.
Further, Kast faces a steep climb to attract the working masses in Chile’s main
industrial and urban heartlands. For the first time in over thirty years, extreme
conservatism has displaced its former centrist allies, and is consolidating as
the dominant right-wing force in Chile. Gaining broad entry among workers
and the poor, however, will depend on the actions of Kast’s radical AD rivals.
On the other side, a Boric victory will not translate into the adoption of his
substantial social democratic program. It is nonetheless essential for a quick
revitalization of anti-neoliberal insurgency. While Congress blocks his
reforms, reaching the presidency and agitating alongside parliamentary allies
for the rebellion’s demands should return the initiative to Chile’s new left and
popular movements. With effective AD adjustments, this scenario could
reconcile the partisan left’s program and mass support for the universal
economic protections from which Boric’s campaign and radicals strayed.
Fortunately, the self-destruction of the Lista del Pueblo coalition degraded the
autonomous currents so influential in grassroots activism just months ago.
After the lessons offered by autonomists’ puerile sectarianism and
fragmentation, more discipline and cohesion can be expected among Chile’s
movement organizations. Much has been made of AD’s urgent need to return
to the Frente Amplio’s origins in independent organizing. But at this moment,
movements’ alignment with AD’s program and coordinated actions in its
defense are also indispensable.
Taking a longer historical view, the Left’s costly mistakes should not obscure
the significance of the Communist Party–Frente Amplio alliance. For the first
time in fifty years, Chile’s popular movements can anchor themselves in a
genuine socialist coalition and program on the cusp of power. The historic
arrival of AD should also pull key sectors of the Socialist Party into its orbit.
Former militants and cadre of Allende’s party, however diminished, can
finally discard the yoke of the disintegrated center-left apparatus. The
subsequent entry of both rank-and-file members and elected politicians should
advance the AD-led anti-neoliberal realignment. More importantly, if AD
comes into its own as the rebellion’s political arm, its consolidation should
reengage working Chileans and preempt the lure of anti-solidaristic populism.
If Apruebo Dignidad comes into its own as the rebellion’s political arm, its
consolidation should reengage working Chileans and preempt the lure of anti-
solidaristic populism.
Fortunately, the first round cemented foundations for expanded working-class
attachment to a radical reform project. AD established itself as the leading
force in the popular townships of the capital and Valparaíso, where the
country’s workers and informal poor are concentrated. Crucially, Boric
resonated particularly in port cities where dockworker activity has been on the
rise: on top of the commanding 35 percent he won in Valparaíso, residents of
San Antonio, the country’s largest port, gave him a huge lead over Kast. And
although Kast prevailed and Parisi outperformed expectations in the north,
working-class constituencies in key regional mining centers backed AD.
Boric received a quarter of the vote in Antofagasta and Los Andes, sites of the
Río Blanco mine and Anglo American and BHP Billiton operations, and
handily took Rancagua, home to the El Teniente mega-pit. Significant support
where labor militancy flourished since the late aughts heralds robust growth
for the Communist Party–Frente Amplio alliance. Not only will it facilitate
AD implantation in Chile’s leading labor sections; it should also act as
constant pressure for the Left to prioritize class-wide reforms. And it will
serve as a powerful antidote against blaming working and poor people if they
feel drawn to a reinvented and reactionary right.
Ironically, the Constituent Assembly could become the most decisive

institution in which revived left forces clash with the hardening right. As
insurgent delegates lost their bluster and national elections eclipsed the
convention’s work, the assembly descended to secondary status. Behind Kast,
Chile’s new far right aims to further denigrate it, eroding its authority as the
country’s highest governing body. The Right will lob volley after volley to
further reduce its credibility and relevance, priming it for the final blow
With or without the presidency, Kast’s forces plan to cultivate an anti-

ratification vote in the Constituent Assembly’s exit referendum. Winning a
majority no vote would be right-wing restorationists’ greatest
accomplishment. Kast and his followers could then embark on a return to the
status quo ante, only this time in the form of an illiberal, post-dictatorship
neoliberalism.
AD will have to do far more than prevent popular rejection of Chile’s new
constitution, an outcome even more unthinkable a year ago than a Kast
victory. Chile’s new left must find a way to once more turn the convention
into the arena of struggle for radical reforms. With only a third in Congress,
any hope for installing a social democratic state will be staked on its
leadership in the assembly.
But to regain prominence in the convention, it will first have to lead the
popular masses back into anti-neoliberal rebellion. Considering Boric’s
overtures to the center left, this will be a tall task. But it stands as the best
chance for left and movement insurgents to retake the initiative and defend
Chile’s political revolution. If AD can direct the growing capacities of the
country’s working masses and this scenario materializes, it will usher in a
bizarre and unpredictable dispute. It would place Chile in a struggle across
parallel and competing ruling bureaucracies. Such institutional dualism could
add missing dynamism and possibilities to the conflict between sociopolitical
transformation and brutal neoliberal restoration.
Historic as it is, Sunday’s election will not congeal a settled political

configuration. As the people confront the pandemic’s aftermath, business
elites decide which realignment best protects profits, and the old regime’s
remnants shuffle between the main rival blocs, a stable resolution to Chile’s
failed post-authoritarian neoliberalism remains elusive. Revived unrest will
surely follow these momentous elections.
More than Sunday’s vote, class conflict during the next presidency — inside
the country’s dueling institutions and outside in worksites and on the streets
— will shape the balance of forces that define the country’s next era. The
laboring masses enjoy more capacity to fight than they’ve held in decades.
The new left alliance, whether in the presidential palace or not, must lead
Chile’s ongoing political revolution and social refoundation.
Socialism Isn’t Just About State

Ownership — It’s About
Redistributing Power
AN INTERVIEW WITH
PELLE DRAGSTED
Throughout decades of neoliberal counterreforms, the most
resilient parts of the Nordic welfare state have been the ones
under direct popular control. Their experience shows that
the best way to push back against capital is to democratize
power in society.
The Nordic countries enjoy a significant amount of democratic ownership as well as an
extensive de-commodification of their economies. (@febiyan / Unsplash)
Editors
Jeremy Corbyn
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Michael Stipe
INTERVIEW BY
Rune Møller Stahl

Andreas Møller Mulvad
Norway’s election last month brought a landslide shift to the Left, including a
parliamentary breakthrough for the socialist Red Party (Rødt). There are now
social-democratic governments in all five Nordic countries, with growing
formations to their left resisting the further dismantling of the region’s welfare
states. After years of retreat and defeats for the Left in the United States and
Europe, the Nordic experience again seems to show a way forward.
The first signs of this Nordic left wave came from the Red-Green Alliance
(Enhedslisten) in Denmark, which has held at least a dozen seats in parliament
since its breakthrough general election campaign ten years ago. One of its
MPs in this period was Pelle Dragsted, who is also the party’s main strategist.
His recent book Nordic Socialism was a surprise bestseller in his homeland,
rekindling long-dormant debates on socialism. The book addresses the nature
of capitalism and how to transform it by building on the legacy of the Nordic
workers’ movements of the twentieth century.
In an interview, Rune Møller Stahl and Andreas Møller Mulvad spoke to

Dragsted about the current state of Nordic social democracy and how new
left-wing forces can build on its historic achievements.
RMS
The starting point for your book is a report the Trump administration
published in 2018, on the purported socialism of the Nordic countries. In
contrast to what we’d normally read in Jacobin and other left-wing
publications, you argue that Trump is right that the Nordic countries are
socialist, or at least more socialist than what they are normally given credit for
by leftists like ourselves, who have defined them as capitalist countries with
generous welfare states. Can you elaborate on why Trump is right?
PD
A key message of my book is that we on the Left haven’t been good enough at
acknowledging our victories and the socialist elements that can be found
within existing economic systems. When Trump and Fox News — but also
Bernie Sanders — all call the Nordic countries socialist, they do get
something right. Namely, that we in the Nordic countries enjoy a significant
amount of democratic ownership as well as an extensive de-commodification
of our economies. This is a product of the historical strength of the working
class in conquering state power but also of the very strong cooperative sector
that existed in the Nordic countries.
It’s difficult to acknowledge this noncapitalist sector, because we on the Left

have been trained to think in terms of societal forms as totalities — as
amounting to society or the economy in its entirety. This way of thinking
assumes that capitalism is all-pervasive, and that there’s no room for any
socialism whatsoever as long as capitalism exists.
The economist Rudolf Meidner said that as long as capital retains ownership, it
has a gun to the head of the working class.
So, inspired by people like Erik Olin Wright and Matt Bruenig of the People’s
Policy Project, I reject this conception of socialism as an either-or. Instead, we
should think of a continuum in which societies can be more or less socialist.
This perspective is particularly relevant for the Nordic countries, where we

have a higher level of common ownership. Let’s define capitalism as a system
in which the owners of capital control the means of production and exchange
their commodities in a market in which they also buy labor power. From this
process they draw a profit. But looking at the Nordic countries, we find that
large parts of these economies simply don’t match with this definition: In
Denmark, the public sector accounts for 20-25 percent of the total economy.
One in three people in the labor market are public employees. And in this
sector, there is no private ownership.
Schools, hospitals, nurseries, et cetera are not owned by capitalists, but by the
citizens in common. No one is drawing a profit, and the goods and services
that are produced are not exchanged in a market, but according to a
solidaristic system of abilities and needs. This sector was created by taking
parts of the economy out of the market realm. Commodities were transformed
into goods accessible to all citizens. This can be called de-commodification.
But apart from the public sector, we also have a considerable democratized
segment of the private sector. The cooperative sector still accounts for quite a
bit of our economy and used to be even more extensive a few decades ago. In
Denmark, the cooperative sector emerged from an upheaval in agricultural
society in the late nineteenth century through a simultaneous struggle for
democracy and against private ownership of dairies, butcheries, and the entire
chain of agricultural production, including product markets for fertilizers and
pesticides. At the same time, consumer coops developed and a bit later, the
workers’ movement began establishing its own cooperatives.
Today, cooperative ownership remains vibrant. Denmark’s second-largest

supermarket chain is owned and governed by its members. Utilities such as
electricity, water, and heating are dominated by cooperatives, and 20 percent
of housing is run cooperatively. Even the financial sector retains significant
elements of common ownership.
This doesn’t mean that such companies represent “pure socialism.” They
function within a market and have to compete on capitalist terms. In many
cases, cooperative members have lost influence over time. And the public
sector is not governed by its workers to anything near the extent we would
desire. Even so, I still think there is something qualitatively different about
these companies, because there is a democratic potential. Their managers are
not accountable to capitalists, but to much wider constituencies of
stakeholders — consumers in the private sector, citizens in the public sector.
Completely different logics can potentially become pervasive in these
companies, and we can exploit that if we treat them as a terrain of struggle.
RMS
But what good is cooperative ownership if you’re still competing in a
capitalist market? The Nordic countries have always had highly export-
dependent economies, so they’ve been vulnerable in that regard. How has this
project succeeded anyway?
PD
As long as the capitalist sector is dominant, there will be pressure on the
democratic sector. But our history shows that capital doesn’t always win. The
Nordic experience shows that the democratic sector can expand for decades at
the expense of the capitalist one. Recently, in the neoliberal period, we have
seen the opposite movement, where capitalist ownership has expanded, and
our society has become less socialist. But my point is that this development
can be reversed, and we can expand the democratic sector, through
democratization of corporate ownership, or by expanding the public sector to
new areas or rolling back privatization.
Even in a society with full cooperative ownership, competition in the market

will limit democracy within companies, especially if you are in a global
market dominated by capitalist firms.
Capital doesn’t always win. The Nordic experience shows that the democratic
sector can expand for decades at the expense of the capitalist one.
We can see this in Denmark’s cooperative agricultural sector. Here, farmer-
owned cooperatives still dominate — especially within the dairy and
slaughterhouse industry. But these companies’ operations don’t show very
impressive societal considerations. They don’t treat employees very well, they
have high CO2 emissions and other environmental problems, too. When these
companies behave this way, it is because of international competitive
pressure. If these companies want to succeed in the international markets, they
are forced to make all these socially harmful decisions.
So, the form of ownership isn’t enough. We also need to look at the
relationship between market and planning. And here we need far more
planning in the economy. This means setting up a political framework that
ensures that competition between companies doesn’t lead to socially harmful
actions.
AMM
Can you give a concrete example of what such a planned economic
intervention might look like?
PD
The Danish Climate Law of 2019 is a pretty clear example of a plan-based
economic approach. It has been decided that emissions must be reduced 70
percent by 2030, and an independent council has been set up to monitor
whether the government — regardless of its political coloration — complies
with the targets. So, a target is set, and afterward all sectors will need to adjust
through concrete policies.
This model could be copied to make an inequality law, a biodiversity law, or a

law of gender equality. The idea would be to set some democratic targets
based on broad, inclusive deliberative processes, and then find the best tools,
whether planned or market-based, to achieve them.
My idea of socialism walks on two legs: ownership and overall planning. So

long as we have capitalist ownership, we will find oligarchic power resting
with capitalists — a power that they can use to resist democratic planning. But
with ownership broadening out and becoming gradually democratized, this
oligarchic power is curtailed. So, it becomes gradually easier to make
democratic decisions about how to structure the economy.
RMS
So, why not a model based purely on planning? Why retain elements of
markets at all when constructing socialism?
PD
The problem with a centrally planned economy, as shown by historical
experience, is that when economies became more complex, they got into
trouble in terms of innovation and efficiency.
But a centrally planned economy also amounts to a centralization of power,

which undermines autonomy for the working class.
Socialism is precisely about allowing people to make decisions about the
issues that are pertinent to their lives. So, I am skeptical about a model like the
Soviet Gosplan, that plans everything centrally down to the tiniest detail.
I believe that we have to deploy market mechanisms to ensure local

ownership. But it must be circumscribed by strict democratic planning.
RMS
In the debate about your book in Denmark, you have been accused of being a
kind of social democrat. What do you say to the people who say that what you
are describing is not really socialism?
I am fascinated by the concept of “functional socialism” developed by the

Swedish Social Democrats, and especially Gunnar Adler Karlsson. The idea is
that while preserving formal capitalist ownership, you empty out its functions
by limiting what the capitalists can use this property for.
For example, if you owned rental property in the 1970s, you would have
formally owned the building, but it was politically decided how much rent you
could charge and how the apartments should be fitted out. Whether you had to
tear down your property was determined by a planning law, and if you sold it
you were heavily taxed.
When the Keynesian system ran into crisis, the fact that the capitalists had been
allowed to retain ownership of the central means of production proved to be an
existential problem for social democracy.
So, maybe you had ownership, but the practical power this brought was highly
restricted. Karlsson compared this to the monarchy in the Nordic countries.
Formally, the monarchs are still heads of state, but in practice they have no
real power. The idea was to do the same with the capitalists.
This was the idea behind the social-democratic project. And it was quite
successful for many decades. But when the crisis hit in the 1970s and the
Keynesian system ran into crisis, the fact that the capitalists had been allowed
to retain ownership of the central means of production proved to be an
existential problem for social democracy. This meant that they could quickly
launch an offensive to roll back all these improvements. And this is the
situation we’ve been in for the last thirty years.
That is why I am skeptical of the social-democratic strategy. It is the Swedish
economist Rudolf Meidner who said that as long as capital retains ownership,
it has a gun to the head of the working class.
That is my conclusion in the book, so I’d strongly reject the idea that what I
am presenting is a reformist plan. But it is a gradualist, rather than a classic
revolutionary strategy. This does not mean that there will be no breaks and
confrontations during that process. It is not a slow evolution into a new
society as Eduard Bernstein imagined — for there are enormous privileges at
stake, and capital will strike back.
But it is delusional to think that the transition to socialism will take place
through one rapid rupture. I do not think that experience we have from history
indicates that this is a good model. The places where it has been implemented
have not succeeded in realizing the egalitarian societies that the
revolutionaries dreamed of creating.
In well-developed societies such as the Nordic countries, there is simply no

appreciable support for leaping into the unknown terrain of a revolutionary
upheaval.
And at the same time, a revolutionary break will also mean an economic
downturn, so if we want to maintain democracy, and that is nonnegotiable for
me, then the question is whether we would be able to maintain power at all
during the ten to twenty years that a social transformation would take.
RMS
You are critical toward the Left’s traditional focus on the nationalization of
the economy. What is your critique here?
PD
The problem is that state ownership is a distant and indirect way of organizing
ownership.
We saw the results of this in the former Eastern Bloc. When capitalism was
reintroduced, there were relatively few protests in the Eastern European
countries. Had the workers felt they really owned their companies, it would
not have been so easy to privatize them all.
At the same time, state ownership in democratic countries is vulnerable in
different ways. We have seen under neoliberalism that all it takes is an
election defeat and then an incoming right-wing government can sell out
everything built up over decades. We saw this with Margaret Thatcher in
Britain, where you had a fairly extensive publicly owned business sector,
which was sold out to the capitalists in a few years.
If we compare this with Denmark, it is not that we haven’t had right-wing

governments that would have liked to expand capitalist ownership. They just
had a harder time with it, because of a more decentralized model of
ownership. There have been attempts to privatize infrastructure, but they’re
owned by cooperatives, so the politicians can’t just sell them.
Thatcher also sold off public housing via the “right to buy” program; they
tried it in Denmark, too, but couldn’t do it because our cooperative housing is
owned by tenants through nonprofits. So paradoxically, it was private property
that prevented housing and infrastructure from being sold to the forces of
capital
This doesn’t mean that I am against public ownership. I basically believe that
public ownership should be greater. A sector like finance or energy should
have far more public ownership.
AMM
Right now, Denmark might be most famous internationally for its very
strict immigration policies, which have been embraced by the ruling Social
Democrats. How do you feel about being part of the parliamentary majority
that keeps them in power?
PD
It is difficult and depressing. While Denmark does have a strong legacy of
solidarity, a substantial proportion of the population find it very hard to extend
this solidarity to refugees and immigrants. And racist opinions are pretty
common in parts of the population.
In this situation, we have a social-democratic party which has decided firmly
on a tough and relentless line on refugees and a strongly polarizing discourse
on immigrants living in Denmark.
Socialism is precisely about allowing people to make decisions about the issues
that are pertinent to their lives.
We do not provide votes for this policy, and we try to fight it and mobilize
against it as well as we can. But there is a pretty big majority behind it in
parliament, consisting of the Social Democrats along with the Right, and
unfortunately also a pretty big majority of the population.
My hope for a solution is to dig in for a long-term effort to organize

politically. It is all about showing that class antagonisms and not nationality is
what matters. The best way to fight racism is to organize across ethnic
divides. The moment you are on the picket line with your colleagues from
Pakistan or Somalia, you are creating solidarity. It is only by organizing and
fighting around class divisions that we can overcome division based on
ethnicity and race.
RMS
Looking at other countries, recent years have brought defeat for Sanders,
[Jeremy] Corbyn, Podemos, and now Die Linke. But if the Left is losing
elsewhere, why is it different in the Nordic countries?
PD
The Nordic left is not in a position to challenge the social democracies for the
hegemonic position within the center-left. We are not in a situation similar to
the one that Podemos, for example, appeared to be heading toward a few years
ago.
But we do have the opportunity to challenge neoliberalism. If we look at how

the COVID crisis was handled, we see a classic social-democratic approach.
Wage losses were fully covered, partially paid for by the state, as long as
firms agreed not to lay off workers. This represents a break with neoliberal
logic, and it means that there is now a greater support for socialist ideas —
that the state should play a direct role in the economy; that we need social
security.
It has been made clear during the COVID pandemic how interdependent we
are. This has led to an increased sense of solidarity. But the roots of this shift
go back further, at least to the financial crisis of 2008, which spelled the end
of the fantasy of capitalism as a crisis-free system.
AMM
How, then, can the Nordic left avoid the traps that ensnared Sanders or
Podemos?
PD
The left-populist strategy that Podemos represented has some intrinsic
problems. You may reach new parts of the electorate by presenting yourself as
a break with “old politics.” But it is not a sustainable strategy in the long term.
Once you’ve been going for ten years and have entered local government, you
have de facto turned into an “ordinary” party. And then you have to introduce
something else.
But I see no reason to be depressed. The attempts by Sanders, [Jeremy]

Corbyn, and others to take power didn’t succeed. But I think that the Left in
such countries should be proud of what they achieved. In both the United
States and the UK, a Left that was completely marginalized — much more so
than anything we have ever experienced in the Nordic countries — made their
way to the center of the political stage. When this happens once, it can happen
again. And so, we should prepare ourselves.
The experiences of Corbyn, Sanders, and Podemos have served as an

immense inspiration for me. When you are that close to power, you have to
think practically. Since the end of the Cold War, socialists have tended to
engage in abstract discussions around esoteric concepts such as Empire by
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. But now we have been forced to think about
how we would take the first steps toward socialism.
This has sparked an incredibly creative process with new think tanks, books,
and discussions. We have produced more reform programs in recent years
than we did for several decades prior. So, we are much better prepared for the
next time that opportunity knocks. Socialism has shifted from being a distant
prospect to a realistic possibility.
Wagner Iglecias
Professor do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Integração da

América Latina (PROLAM) e da Escola de Artes, Ciências e
Humanidades da USP
Os desafios de Gabriel Boric

Diante de tantos e complexos desafios o Chile de Boric será acompanhado com
curiosidade e entusiasmo por progressistas do mundo todo
22 de dezembro de 2021, 18:26 h Atualizado em 22 de dezembro de 2021, 19:02

 1
Gabriel Boric (Foto: Rodrigo Garrido/Reuters)

Apoie o 247 ICL
Por Wagner Iglecias
(Publicado no site A Terra é Redonda)
Os chilenos foram às urnas neste último domingo e a apuração confirmou o que todas as
pesquisas já apontavam: o esquerdista Gabriel Boric, de 35 anos, será o novo presidente
do país. Ele vai comandar uma nação de mais de 19 milhões de habitantes, com a maior
renda per capita e o quinto maior PIB da América Latina. Sua chegada ao poder põe
fim a dois ciclos históricos do Chile e abre um novo período naquele país.
O primeiro ciclo que se encerra é o do Chile neoliberal. Com o golpe de Estado de
1973, o general Augusto Pinochet instaurou uma longa e violenta ditadura que fez do
país o primeiro laboratório mundial dos experimentos neoliberais. É bem verdade que
na Argentina, onde outro golpe ocorreu três anos depois, também se tentou implantar, e
também a ferro e fogo, as fórmulas do Estado mínimo. Mas não há comparação com o
caso chileno, no qual foi muito bem sucedido o desmonte do Estado socialista que
Salvador Allende tentava levar a cabo e do próprio incipiente Estado de Bem Estar que
o presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva criou nos anos 1960.
Sob as lições do Prof. Milton Friedman, da Universidade de Chicago, o Chile foi
radicalmente transformado, convertendo-se numa economia cuja prioridade era criar um
bom ambiente de negócios para investidores internacionais, mesmo que para isso
políticas públicas fundamentais para a promoção do bem estar, como saúde, educação e
previdência social fossem convertidas em mercadorias através de radicais processos de
privatização. Apesar do crescimento econômico, da projeção da economia chilena no
cenário mundial e da entrada do país na Organização para Cooperação e
Desenvolvimento Econômico (OCDE), o Chile continuou marcado pela desigualdade
social e por índices alarmantes de pobreza.
As grandes manifestações de rua, protagonizadas principalmente por estudantes, a partir
dos anos 2000, já apontavam para o esgotamento daquele modelo e o desejo de encerrar
aquele ciclo. Diversas mobilizações pelo direito à educação pública, gratuita e de
qualidade tornaram-se históricas no país. Entre elas a chamada “Revolução dos
Pinguins”, liderada por secundaristas, em 2006, e os grandes protestos de estudantes
universitários em 2011. Daquele movimento surgiu uma nova geração de lideranças,
como as atuais deputadas Camilla Vallejo e Karol Cariola, o deputado Giorgio Jackson
e o recém-eleito presidente Gabriel Boric. A chegada daquela geração ao comando do
país encerra, também, aquele segundo ciclo, de militância na oposição. E abre outro,
muito mais complexo.

PUBLICIDADE
São muitos os desafios para o governo Boric. Um deles é garantir a aprovação, em
referendo popular, da nova Constituição. Ela está sendo redigida por uma assembleia
com paridade de gênero e representação dos povos indígenas. A partir dela será
possível, efetivamente, redefinir o papel do Estado na economia e na promoção do bem
estar social coletivo. Recuperar a centralidade do poder público na provisão de serviços
públicos como educação, saúde e previdência é um anseio de grande parte da sociedade
chilena. Tarefa inclusive que os governos da Concertación não conseguiram alcançar
nos vinte anos em que governaram o país.
Caberá ainda ao governo Boric garantir a ampliação dos mecanismos de participação
popular nos processos decisórios, multiplicando os instrumentos de democracia direta,
como conselhos locais de caráter deliberativo, num cenário em que novas forças sociais
demandammuito mais interlocução entre Estado e sociedade civil. Outro desafio
extremamente complexo será redefinir os papéis das Forças Armadas e da polícia
militarizada numa sociedade democrática com demandas sociais diversas.
Na economia os desafios não serão menores. O Chile precisa diversificar sua matriz
produtiva, avançar para além da mineração e da agroindústria, exportar mais que cobre,
celulose, frutas, vinhos e pescado. Mas como ampliar a pauta de exportações dada a
histórica inserção subalterna do país na economia mundial, como de resto ocorre a toda
a América Latina?
PUBLICIDADE
Como, em plena sociedade do conhecimento, gerar tecnologias e patentes próprias e
diminuir a relação de dependência em relação a corporações transnacionais e governos
de outros países? E como redefinir vocação econômicado país numa época em que a
preservação ambiental é um imperativo? Não será surpresa se a nova Constituição
chilena declarar, a exemplo do que já faz a Carta Magna equatoriana, a natureza como
um sujeito de direitos, que deve ter seus ciclos produtivos e reprodutivos respeitados.
Some-se a isso o desafio de mudar o modelo de desenvolvimento respeitando, também,

os povos originários e seus territórios, suas culturas e suas economias, seus modos de
ser e de viver.
Inúmeros outros desafios se apresentam nesse ciclo que se abre a partir de agora. Há
dias o Chile aprovou a legalização do aborto, mas há muitas outras demandas das
mulheres chilenas ainda não contempladas em uma sociedade marcada pelo
patriarcalismo. Elas seguem trabalhando mais e ganhando menos que seus
companheiros, sendo as principais responsáveis pelo cuidado de crianças, doentes e
idosos e seguem vítimas de variados tipos de violência.
Por último, mas não menos importante, apresentam-se ao governo Boric a questão da
imigração e o desafio de reconectar o Chile à América Latina. O país pertenceu à
Unasul e faz parte da Celac. Mas jamais foi membro do Mercosul e priorizou, nas
últimas décadas, acordos bilaterais com EUA, União Europeia e países da região Ásia-
Pacífico. Uma reorientação do país em direção a seus vizinhos mais próximos poderá
ser saudável não apenas ao Chile, mas a toda a América Latina.

PUBLICIDADE
Diante de tantos e complexos desafios o Chile de Boric será acompanhado com
curiosidade e entusiasmo por progressistas do mundo todo. De alguma forma como
ocorreu com o governo Allende, há meio século
O Chile ensina: é debaixo e

desigual

Por Carlos A. Villaba

23/12/2021 10:32
A INFORMAÇÃO NÃO
É MERCADORIA,
É UM BEM PÚBLICO.
Venha se somar aos mais de 100.000 leitores cadastrados.
CADASTRE-SE

“Há dois pães. Você come dois. Eu nenhum.
Consumo médio: um pão por pessoa”
Nicanor Parra, citado pelo presidente eleito Gabriel Boric, em
seu discurso da vitória
Ele foi o candidato mais votado da história do Chile, nas
eleições com maior participação. Agora é o presidente eleito, e
será o mais jovem de todos os presidentes de seu país, com 36
anos, que serão cumpridos justamente um mês antes de sua
posse, no dia 11 de março. Também é o mais “progressista”,
seja lá o que signifique esse conceito… Todos esses dados são
verdadeiros, porém não explicam o que aconteceu, não
iluminam o processo de participação popular e setorial nunca
visto nas terras do Salvador Allende, dos irmãos Parra, de
poetas como Pablo Neruda e Gabriel Mistral, e de padres como
Raúl Silva Henríquez.
Há quase 200 anos o Chile se chama Chile e existem diferentes

tentativas de explicar a origem de uma palavra que se confunde
com as vozes dos povos originários. Por que ficar com alguns
deles e não brincar com o “chili”, palavra com a qual o povo
aimará definia o “fim do mundo”, ou o “lugar mais longe”, ou
“o mais fundo da terra”? Ou com a expressão quíchua “chiri”,
que remete até a “fronteira”, como os incas chamavam o
extremo sul do seu império.
Qualquer que seja o sentido escolhido, aquele “fim do mundo”

onde os interesses das multinacionais situam a nação sul-
americana esteve sempre na mira do país hegemônico do
hemisfério, devido aos seus bens sociais compartilhados
(concebidos como “recursos” pelas corporações), por sua
projeção na Antártida e por sua abertura para o Oceano Pacífico
que se conecta com o sudeste da Ásia e com uma China cada
vez mais estratégica. Os Estados Unidos, além de produzirem
desestabilização do processo de transformação iniciado pela
Unidade Popular de Salvador Allende em 1970, se
encarregaram de construir o chamado “Milagre do Chile”.
Aquela experiência não foi apoiada somente no terrorismo de

Estado do general Augusto Pinochet – com tortura, prisões
arbitrárias e campos de concentração –, na cooperação da CIA
(Agência Central de Inteligência) e no Pentágono. O governo
dos Estados Unidos incluiu o roteiro de Milton Friedman, um
dos fundadores da Escola de Economia de Chicago, berço das
políticas de livre mercado, desregulamentação e supressão de
qualquer tipo de procedimento compensatório como o proposto
pelo keynesianismo.
A ditadura de Pinochet começou em 1973, com a derrubada e

morte de Allende, e terminou somente em 1990. Seu laboratório
econômico fez o desemprego saltar de 4,3% – quando seus
economistas de Chicago se instalaram no Palácio de La Moneda
– para mais de 22%. Os salários perderam 40% de seu poder de
compra e a pobreza subiu de 20% nos Anos 70 para 40% no
final dos Anos 80. O pacote também produziu números
macroeconômicos aplaudidos pelo FMI (Fundo Monetário
Internacional), e se completou com uma violenta redução dos
gastos públicos, privatização de empresas estatais, redução das
proteções tarifárias e promoção do investimento e da
especulação estrangeira.
Como resultado dessas políticas, houve um alto crescimento da

desigualdade socioeconômica, o que levou o Chile a figurar
entre as 26 nações mais desiguais do mundo, de um total de
156, segundo o índice de Gini. Em outra lista, com dados de
2013, o Banco Mundial colocou o país no sétimo lugar entre
191 países, apenas cinco degraus acima de países muito pobres,
Haiti e África do Sul.
A vitória popular deste domingo (19/12) é a expressão de um

conjunto de componentes que nos permitiram tirar de debaixo
do tapete a verdadeira situação do país, desde as concepções
econômico-estruturais às ideológicas e culturais, cunhadas por
décadas de pinochetismo e suas variantes. A rebelião
organizada de diferentes setores, dos jovens e das mulheres, dos
povos empobrecidos e das nações indígenas, encheu o curso de
um rio que levou os partidos tradicionais – a começar pelo
partido governante – e as corporações econômicas, e
desembocou em uma Assembleia Constituinte sem paralelo no
mundo, e com opções eleitorais polarizadas, que levaram a
população a dizer “não” à extrema direita e eleger a figura que
ocupou o espaço de compreensão do conjunto das demandas
sociais.
O Chile deve ser o primeiro caso em que diferentes

necessidades e diferentes setores “constroem” um presidente e
não em que um candidato “convença” um eleitorado difuso.
Essa realidade que deve fazer os setores nacionais e populares
da região a pensarem que, em repetidas ocasiões, elas deixar
para trás as expressões feministas, o mal-estar juvenil, as
reivindicações pelos preços dos bens de consumo básicos, os
protestos contra o extrativismo sem limites ou as lutas contra os
salários e a fome as pensões, como se fossem postais de Natal,
dolorosas mas efémeras. Com isso, não constroem um
verdadeiro programa de governo com aquilo que a agenda
social exige.
Os governos da desigualdade
As desigualdades podem levar a diferentes tipos de

“catástrofes”, econômicas, sociais, políticas. A disparidade
entre países com níveis de desenvolvimento semelhantes mostra
que as políticas e instituições que cada nação gera são capazes
de influenciar sua evolução, diminuindo-a com medidas
anticíclicas, ou aumentando-a, o que indica a má gestão das
autoridades.
Desde o fim da ditadura chilena houve sete mandatos

constitucionais que mais pareciam faces diferentes de um
mesmo poliedro, caracterizadas pela permanência de uma
constituição imposta pela ditadura em 1980, e também pela
violência contra os povos nativos, especialmente os mapuche,
através de diferentes ferramentas. Esses sete mandatos foram
respeitosos com os proibitivos sistemas privados de educação e
de saúde, e com um sistema de previdência também entregue
aos privados, que condena a maioria dos idosos a subsídios
miseráveis entregues pelo estado para compensar o péssimo
serviço das empresas. Milhões de chilenas e chilenos
consideram que, do fim da ditadura em diante, a gestão da
economia foi injusta, com um punhado de famílias enriquecidas
a níveis extremos, empresas com lucros exorbitantes, saúde e
educação precárias ou inacessíveis, salários abaixo da média
continental e com aposentadorias ridiculamente baixas, sob o
controle das chamadas AFP (administradoras de fundos de
pensão).
Mais de três décadas após o retorno à constitucionalidade, a

redução das desigualdades mal consegue mover o amperímetro
macroeconômico e não gera sinais concretos na vida real do
povo chileno.
É preciso ser chilena ou chileno, pai ou mãe, colegial ou

universitário, para entender como funciona o sistema
educacional e como ele destrói a economia familiar da
população. No marco das diretrizes, primeiro da Escola de
Chicago e depois do Consenso de Washington, o pinochetismo
cedeu o controle majoritário dos estabelecimentos educacionais
aos grupos privados, obrigando as famílias a contribuir com
75% dos recursos investidos no setor. E o formato se manteve
até a década passada. Ao longo do caminho, porém, a
mobilização setorial deixou marcas que, na realidade,
constituem indicadores do estado subterrâneo das águas
populares.
Em 2006, durante o primeiro mandato presidencial de Michelle

Bachelet, ocorreu a maior mobilização estudantil da história do
país até aquela época. Ficou conhecida como “Revolução dos
Pinguins”, em alusão às vestimentas dos estudantes do ensino
médio, com camisa branca e jaleco escuro, um azul escuro
quase preto, uma combinação que os torna parecidos aos
habitantes da Antártida e da costa patagônica. O governo da
época reagiu produzindo mudanças leves, mas sem alterar o
modelo privatizado de educação.
Mas faltava um ator social nessa luta pela educação, e ele se fez
presente, ao mesmo tempo em que começou a mostrar a nudez
do rei.
As ruas existem (as alamedas também)

Em 2011, os estudantes novamente foram às ruas, mas desta
vez foram os universitários, que protestaram contra o regime
que desloca o Estado do seu compromisso educativo. A
mobilização foi avaliada como uma das maiores desde o fim da
ditadura, e também foi o gatilho, digno de um roteiro liberal
ordinário: o anúncio da venda de parte do imóvel da
Universidade Central do Chile ao conglomerado econômico
Empresa de Investimentos Norte Sur por milhões de dólares,
em troca do controle de 50% da casa de estudos e de algumas
de suas propriedades, com a criação de empresas e concentração
de poder em um pequeno grupo.
Durante aquela onda de manifestações, surgiu Camila Vallejo, a

figura mais reconhecida naquela luta pela educação gratuita e
de qualidade, em um dos países mais caros do mundo para se
estudar. Junto com ela, apareceu um jovem de 25 anos, vindo
da região pré-antártica de Magallanes, barbudo, peludo, com
blusa verde oliva… Era Gabriel Boric, que assumiu a
presidência da Federação de Estudantes da Universidade do
Chile no ano seguinte. Essa catapulta permitiu a ele ser eleito
deputado e representante do Movimento Autonomista em
novembro de 2017.
Os estudantes desmascararam, naquela época, uma das piores

faces da desigualdade existente em um país que, com cinismo,
se apresenta ao mundo como modelo.
Não há dique capaz de frear esse crescimento
No dia 4 de outubro de 2019, o Painel de Especialistas do

Transporte Público do Chile, entidade “técnica”, supostamente
“autônoma”, criada por lei, anunciou um aumento de 30 pesos
chilenos (cerca de 20 centavos de real) na passagem do metrô.
Dez dias depois, os estudantes do ensino médio, novamente

coordenados a partir de suas redes sociais, foram o estopim
mais sensível da sociedade chilena. Os estudantes universitários
imediatamente aderiram, e o protesto começou. “Fazemos isso
pelos nossos pais, eles já gastam muito dinheiro com
transporte”, explicaram, e pediram para evitar o pagamento
pulando as catracas do metrô de Santiago.
Em menos de uma semana, o protesto aumentou, vagões foram

destruídos, o serviço foi suspenso. A polícia reprimiu
duramente. Em 19 de outubro, dia seguinte à primeira grande
jornada de revolta social, o presidente Sebastián Piñera decretou
estado de emergência no país, instalou um toque de recolher em
diferentes cidades e, no final do dia, acabou cancelando o
aumento. Com talento símio e a delicadeza de um paquiderme,
afirmou que “estamos em guerra contra um inimigo poderoso e
implacável, que não respeita nada nem ninguém e está disposto
a usar a violência e o crime sem limites”. Acabou inspirado o
que seria, no dia 25 de outubro, a maior mobilização que o país
já teve, e que transformou a Praça Baquedano na Praça da
Dignidade, agora rebatizada pelos manifestantes.
Os desavisados, os míopes e os analistas financiados pelo poder

econômico ficaram “surpresos” com tanta raiva expressada por
causa de alguns centavos. Os manifestantes, que não eram mais
apenas estudantes, mas centenas e centenas de milhares de
mulheres e homens, representantes da diversidade sexual,
nações indígenas, trabalhadores, desempregados ou não,
artistas, famílias inteiras, todos encontraram nesse ato a porta de
escape para as frustrações, injustiças, para a ausência do Estado
na saúde, na educação, na falta de verdade e justiça…
Exigiram um modelo socioeconômico mais justo e escolheram

a única ferramenta à sua disposição para reformar um sistema
que, para muitos, transformou o Chile em uma “empresa
privada”. Um enorme conjunto de desigualdades que
explodiram em luta.
O “país modelo” que o Chile projetava internacionalmente não

podia mais esconder seus flagelos, estava completamente nu
perante o mundo. O governo suspendeu a cúpula de dirigentes
da APEC (Fórum de Cooperação Econômica Ásia-Pacífico) e a
COP25 (Conferência Contra as Mudanças Climáticas),
tentativas de se mostrar aos países do “primeiro mundo”.
Diante das irreprimíveis maiorias que transformaram a

realidade das ruas, o presidente tentou fazer uma manobra
enganosa e oferecer, como resposta às reivindicações, a criação
de um “parlamento constituinte”, favorável às suas ideias. Mas
no dia 15 de novembro, acabou recuando e aceitando o “Acordo
pela Paz Social Paz e a Nova Constituição”. A mobilização
contra as injustiças e a ausência de políticas governamentais foi
a verdadeira convocadora daquela assembleia, e não a Lei nº
21200. Assim, o povo torceu a história do país e superou o
último obstáculo para o plebiscito. De quebra, destruiu de uma
vez por todas a credibilidade do governo de Piñera.
Contra a constituição de Pinochet

A participação popular tornou-se o sinal de alerta para uma
sociedade em que os chamados “democratas céticos” – aqueles
que mostram “apoio normativo” à democracia, mas não
confiam em nenhuma de suas instituições centrais – passaram
de 25% para 43% da população durante a última década, de
acordo com o relatório elaborado pelo PNUD (Programa das
Nações Unidas para o Desenvolvimento).
Não houve invasão do Palácio de La Moneda, mas se pode

dizer que a constituição da ditadura foi sim tomada de assalto.
Aquela que, por exemplo, permitiu ao genocida Pinochet ser
senador vitalício, sem o julgamento dos seus crimes, sem
punição, sem a memória de todos os danos causados. Além de
manter o Estado em um papel residual na prestação de serviços
básicos, esmagado pelo favoritismo ao setor privado. Desta
ação contra a carta magna ditatorial surgiu, em primeiro lugar,
um modelo de assembleia único na região, com equidade de
gênero e vagas reservadas para os povos indígenas. Em segundo
lugar, veio a punição eleitoral para a direita e a demolição das
representações partidárias tradicionais, na eleição dos
constituintes, em maio deste ano.
A idade média dos constituintes é de 45 anos, mais de uma

década abaixo das médias parlamentares tradicionais. Uma
porcentagem desses constituintes não pertence às elites
tradicionais, ou a partidos políticos. Mostram, sim,
representações e lideranças territoriais, ambientais ou de
gênero.
Das 155 cadeiras, 17 correspondem a povos indígenas, 48

%u20B%u20Ba candidatos independentes de diferentes setores
sociais. A coalizão governista obteve 37 das cadeiras e ficou
longe de ter um terço dos votos (52), que permitiria ter poder de
veto, para frear qualquer conteúdo que lhe pareça indesejável. A
coalizão Aprovo Dignidade, da qual surgiu o presidente eleito,
obteve 28 representantes, e a coalizão de líderes de movimentos
sociais conhecida como Lista do Povo obteve 27 vagas. A
antiga aliança de centro-esquerda entre socialistas, democratas-
cristãos e social-democratas, hoje conhecida como Lista do
Aprovo, ficou com 25 cadeiras.
A esmagadora derrota das coalizões que governaram o Chile

nos últimos 31 anos desenhou um cenário em que a
representante do povo mapuche, Elisa Loncón, terminou
brilhando como a estrela dos novos tempos, sendo eleita
presidenta da Constituinte. Mulher indígena de 58 anos, ela é
professora, linguista e ativista mapuche. Iniciou seu trabalho
afirmando que a Assembleia Constituinte “transformará o Chile
em um Chile plurinacional e intercultural, naquele sonho de
nossos ancestrais, de um país plural, multilíngue, com todas as
culturas, com todos os povos, com as mulheres e com os
territórios”.
Passaram a trabalhar no palácio do antigo Congreso, reunidos

entre diferentes setores chilenos, para constituir um novo
modelo, capaz de se desfazer da mochila liberal e neoliberal e
lançaram a penúltima mensagem, uma foto do que aconteceria
poucos meses depois: a superação do passado e a construção de
uma nova etapa.
A maré terminou rebentando nas urnas

Faltava uma etapa. Na verdade duas, se contarmos o primeiro
turno eleitoral, ocorrido em 21 de novembro. Antes ocorreram
as prévias de 18 de julho, nas quais foram escolhidos os
candidatos presidenciais. Os resultados de novembro
confirmaram a decisão do eleitorado de abandonar as coalizões
que sucederam o regime de Pinochet, sem enterrar suas
políticas.
O candidato mais próximo do presidente Piñera, Sebastián

Sichel, mal alcançou 12,78% no primeiro turno, menos que os
20,56% que sua coalizão teve na eleição dos constituintes. A
antiga Concertação, representada por Yasna Provoste, obteve
ainda menos: 11,60%, o que também ficou abaixo do
desempenho de maio (14,46%).
O passado ficou fora da disputa presidencial e a opção

neoliberal passou a ser defendida pelo candidato da extrema
direita, José Antonio Kast, do Partido Republicano (PLR), que
venceu o primeiro turno com 27,9% dos votos, enquanto a
coalizão Aprovo Dignidade, liderada por Gabriel Boric, aquele
estudante que lutou uma década antes pelos direitos do seu
setor, e que ainda é ainda muito jovem, apesar de ter adotado
um penteado mais sóbrio, concentrou as simpatias de 25,8% do
eleitorado nacional.
Como um candidato passa de menos de 26% dos votos para

quase 56% em apenas 28 dias? Como saltar de 1.814.777 para
4.620.671 votos em quatro semanas? Como se dá esse
fenômeno, tendo pouquíssima estrutura partidária, e com os
meios de comunicação o rotulam como “muito jovem”,
“perigoso” e “comunista”?
As respostas são muitas, e muito boas. Todas elas foram

construídas pelos chilenos. Talvez o mais importante é que
neste domingo votaram 1,25 milhão de pessoas a mais que no
primeiro turno. Somaram seus votos e elevaram a participação
de 47,33% para os históricos 55,65%, em um país onde não é
obrigatório votar.
Provavelmente a segunda razão é a rejeição à ditadura e seus

continuadores gerenciais, e também a uma proposta que
defende a extrema liberdade de mercado, a uma sociedade que
conhece as consequências disso no bolso e no corpo. Esse
sentimento surge das demandas de cada um dos setores e
grupos que conseguiram se expressar ao longo das duas
primeiras décadas deste século, do direito ao próprio corpo às
demandas de novos formatos produtivos, culturais e ambientais.
No debate indefinido entre os dois “finalistas”, Kast apresentou

uma imagem “presidencial” impecável. Bem vestido, mais
arrumado, falando mais pausadamente. Era a coisa mais
próxima de um presidente. Talvez, não fosse a melhor ideia
ligá-lo à imagem que ele tem agora, totalmente desacreditada e
desgastada. Talvez o telespectador o relacionou ao presidente
Sebastián Piñera, cuja fortuna aumentou “em meio à
pandemia”, segundo a nada comunista revista Forbes. O atual
mandatário é proprietário ou acionista de empresas como LAN
Chile, Citigroup, Chilevisión, Colo-Colo, Farmácias Ahumada,
Grupo Penta, Eneida Sarl, Sociedade Agropecuária Los
Corrales, Parque de Chiloé e Bancard.
Além do parentesco com um dos economistas de Chicago que
transformou o Chile em uma corporação, Kast não privou seus
seguidores minoritários de confirmar o que queriam ouvir e o
que seus adversários acusavam: ser de “extrema direita”,
“ultraconservador”, “pinochetista”, “autoritário”, “homofóbico,
“antiaborto”… Como não poderia deixar de ser, antes ele havia
defendido a campanha para “rejeitar” a nova constituição.
Participação e vitória
O Chile celebrou, de uma ponta a outra do seu mapa, em

espanhol, em mapudungun (idioma mapuche), em aymará,
rapanui, quíchua, kunza, kakan, kawésqar… Os pobres e os
setores médios restritos celebram, estudantes e profissionais
celebraram, mas, acima de tudo, as mulheres celebram. As
mulheres e os mais jovens foram os grupos sociais, de idade e
de gênero, que marcaram o caminho, expressaram seus desejos
e suas lutas, mesmo enfrentando balas, borracha, gases, lesões,
perda de visão e muitas vidas. O rio que varreu a tentativa
continuísta e construiu a alternativa, deu conteúdo à eleição do
domingo 19 de dezembro, e levou o candidato Boric não só a
ser o presidente eleito, mas também o líder de um projeto de
governo que pretende transformar o que deve ser transformado
no Chile, nos próximos anos.
Como sempre, as práticas governamentais se encarregarão de

mostrar se está definida a participação ativa do Estado, a boa
administração dos recursos, com distribuição justa e progressiva
da renda, a realização de sistemas que incluam educação, saúde,
previdência, energia, justiça e punição.
Os números mostram que cerca de 70% das mulheres e 65%
dos homens com menos de 30 anos que votaram em Boric. Na
mesma faixa etária, o comparecimento no segundo turno
aumentou em 10 e 8% respectivamente, sinal da importância da
mobilização porta a porta, telefone a telefone, não só dos
candidatos, mas também dos cidadãos cientes do que se havia
conquistado ao longo dos anos, participando, protestando e
lutando. O país, suas famílias, seus costumes, seus bolsos,
estavam em suas mãos. Ou eles a usavam para produzir uma
mudança ou teriam que ir para casa, derrotados, de novo, pelas
mãos daqueles que faziam do seu país uma empresa, como
acontece em tantos países deste hemisfério.
O Chile ensina por conta própria, porque mostrou que poderia

acabar com a “pinochetização” ideológica, que levou a tolerar
uma economia de mercado, empobrecedora e desequilibradora
como poucas, escondida por trás das figuras dos tecnocratas que
trabalham para as transnacionais e seus sócios locais.
Para a região, o exemplo do Chile constitui o acolhimento a um

novo elo da cadeia de recuperação de uma Grande Pátria, que
aos poucos, inexoravelmente, se (re)constrói um bloco
solidários e supranacional, a partir das mudanças de governo já
ocorridas após a contra-maré aos avanços obtidos por Hugo
Chaves na Venezuela, Evo Morales na Bolívia, Tabaré Vázquez
e Pepe Mujica no Uruguai, Rafael Correa no Equador, Fernando
Lugo no Paraguai, Lula e Dilma no Brasil, Néstor e Cristina
Kirchner na Argentina, ou Michelle Bachelet no próprio Chile.
Talvez, as melhores lições que podem ser extraídas dessa virada

histórica são os governos, que estão divididos entre a pandemia
e as pressões das corporações econômicas, sem falar dos
políticos com intenções eleitorais. Ambos devem observar o
ocorrido, verificar a forma como as necessidades das maiorias,
mais cedo ou mais tarde, encontram uma forma de se expressar,
bem acima das lacunas das siglas partidárias, mesmo das
candidaturas.
Os feminismos e suas lutas por justiça salarial, contra a

violência, o machismo e o patriarcado são hoje atores
relevantes. No entanto, os partidos majoritários da região não os
veem como fator determinante em seus planos ou ações. No
Chile, as mulheres foram o motor do triunfo de Gabriel Boric.
Os trabalhadores, empobrecidos, marginalizados, não têm lugar
no planejamento das políticas públicas. A mudança climática é
uma história do que não vai acontecer, à medida que o gelo
derrete e as tempestades, as secas e as inundações são cada mês
mais severas. Solidariedade e “bom viver” são demolidos pelo
individualismo e pelo consumismo.
A América é cortada por rios, potentes, poluídos, represados…

No Chile, o rio ressoou e levou tudo o que se opunha a ele.
Carlos A. Villaba é jornalista argentino e investigador

associado ao Centro Latinoamericano de Análise
Estratégica (CLAE), além de membro da Usina do
Pensamento Nacional e Popular
(https://usinadelpensamientonacional.com.ar)
*Publicado originalmente em estrategia.la | Tradução de

Victor Farinelli
Três décadas após o fim da
URSS, agrava-se a rivalidade
EUA-Rússia
As tensões que o mundo vive hoje no Leste da Europa são a
expressão máxima de uma luta geopolítica, intensificada nas
últimas semanas entre os EUA e a Rússia
27 de dezembro de 2021, 10:26 h Atualizado em 27 de dezembro de 2021, 12:18

 10
(Foto: Brasil 247/divulgação)

Apoie o 247 ICL
247, por José Reinaldo Carvalho - Neste domingo

transcorreu o 30º aniversário da dissolução da União das
Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas. Este aniversário coincide
com o momento de maior tensão entre a Rússia e os Estados
Unidos. A Otan, aliança militar comandada pela superpotência
norte-americana, encontra-se às portas do território russo. A
estratégia de expansão da aliança atlântica envolve a inclusão
de países ex-soviéticos, como a Geórgia, a Moldávia e
principalmente a Ucrânia. Para Moscou, trata-se de uma linha
vermelha, que Washington e seus aliados da Otan foram
advertidos a não transpor. As declarações do presidente
Vladimir Putin em sua coletiva de imprensa pelo encerramento
do ano de 2021 foram enfáticas. A Rússia está disposta a ir às
últimas consequências para defender a segurança de suas
fronteiras.
A estratégia de expansão da Otan está em total contradição

com os esforços das forças progressistas mundiais e países
que lutam por sua independência para construir um sistema
internacional baseado no multilateralismo e visando à paz. A
existência mesma da Otan é um contrassenso. Com a queda
da União Soviética desapareceu também o Pacto de Varsóvia,
o que deveria ser acompanhado pela extinção da aliança
atlântica. Esta, ao contrário, atualiza seus conceitos de guerra,
inclui neles a guerra híbrida, promove intervenções em outras
regiões (Iugoslávia, Iraque, Afeganistão, Líbia), expande-se
para o Leste da Europa e sinaliza até mesmo o interesse de
aliar-se a países governados pela extrema direita na América
Latina, como o Brasil e a Colômbia.
O contencioso EUA-Rússia, com o envolvimento da Otan,

tornou-se a principal ameaça à paz mundial neste final de
2021. A rivalidade do imperialismo estadunidense com a
Rússia afigura-se tão intensa como nos tempos da Guerra Fria
entre os EUA e a antiga URSS, mas não tem o mesmo sentido
ideológico, pois desenvolve-se em outro contexto político
interno na Rússia e outra conjuntura internacional.
A primeira década que se seguiu à dissolução da URSS foi

dramática desde todos os pontos de vista nos planos interno e
externo. O país regrediu, com a liquidação de conquistas
históricas e a submissão ao imperialismo estadunidense. Quem
vivenciou aqueles acontecimentos percebe o contraste com os
fatos atuais. A geopolítica da Rússia mudou inteiramente desde
o final da década de 1990. A Rússia evoluiu desde então de
país condenado a se tornar pária no sistema internacional a um
dos principais fatores de contenção e mesmo enfrentamento do
imperialismo estadunidense. Passou a exercer papel de
destaque no sistema internacional, valendo-se da herança
soviética, assumindo posições nacionalistas e reforçando seu
poderio militar e nuclear, processo em que foi decisivo o papel
de Vladimir Putin, que imprimiu uma orientação geopolítica
diametralmente oposta à de seu antecessor, Boris Ieltsin.
A nova transformação da Rússia em ator preponderante no

cenário internacional não significa um retorno ao socialismo
nem a reconstrução da União Soviética, o que inclusive explica
a posição do Partido Comunista da Federação Russa, de apoio
pontual a aspectos da política externa de Putin, ao passo que
se opõe sistematicamente ao novo sistema capitalista, que
combina políticas nacionalistas com neoliberais, ações de
defesa da soberania nacional com outras de caráter
antissocial.
"A Rússia nunca demonstrou 'ambições imperiais' e não tem

planos para reviver a União Soviética", disse a presidente do
Conselho da Federação (câmara alta do parlamento), Valentina
Matviyenko, em entrevista coletiva nesta segunda-feira (27),
quando questionada sobre as alegações de que a Rússia tinha
planos para recriar a União Soviética", informa a agência
TASS.
PUBLICIDADE
Prossegue a dirigente: "Em primeiro lugar, mesmo que alguém
desejasse fazer isso, seria impossível. Em segundo lugar,
nunca demonstramos nenhuma ambição imperial. O trem se
foi. Hoje em dia, é essencial desenvolver uma cooperação
mutuamente benéfica em uma nova base. Não temos tais
planos e estaremos vivendo em paz, acordo, amor e amizade
com nossos vizinhos e irmãos em todos os antigos Estados da
União".
As declarações foram dadas em resposta às da subsecretária

de Estado dos Estados Unidos para Assuntos Políticos, Victoria
Nuland, segundo a qual seu país está preocupado com a
suposta intenção de Moscou de recriar a União Soviética.
Em complemento, o vice-ministro das Relações Exteriores da

Rússia, Andrey Rudenko, tem chamado a atenção para o fato
de que o Ocidente estava tentando transformar o espaço pós-
soviético em uma "zona de conflitos e tensões permanentes".
PUBLICIDADE
O estágio atual da rivalidade faz lembrar as afirmações do

decano da política externa estadunidense Henry Kissinger, que
há 30 anos, ao comemorar a "vitória sobre o comunismo",
alertou o establishment de seu país para o fato de que o triunfo
americano só seria completo quando a Rússia deixasse de ser
uma potência, independentemente de ser ou não um país
liderado pelo partido comunista.
Ao longo das últimas duas décadas os Estados Unidos têm

dado curso a ações anti-Rússia nos campos político,
diplomático, comercial e militar. A Rússia, por seu turno, não
suspendeu sua estratégia de defesa e consolidação, pelo
contrário, avançou, visando a fortalecer-se como potência e a
ocupar seu espaço como ator relevante no sistema
internacional.
As tensões que o mundo vive hoje, com o agravamento das

disputas no Leste europeu em torno da expansão da Otan,
aliança militar comandada pelos Estados Unidos, são a
expressão máxima dessa luta geopolítica, intensificada nas
últimas semanas.
PUBLICIDADE
***
Para além dos problemas geopolíticos, vale a pena, ao menos

de passagem, relembrar o sentido ideológico da dissolução da
URSS, como anúncio de um artigo posterior. Os atos finais da
derrocada da superpotência socialista, que durante mais de
sete décadas mudou a face de um país outrora feudal, imperial
(prisão de nações e povos, como dizia Lênin), comandou a
vitória dos povos soviéticos e da humanidade contra o
nazifascismo e alterou a correlação mundial de forças, foram
tomados por Mikhail Gorbachev, um líder político que entrou
para a história como um dos maiores traidores do próprio povo
e de outros povos, como corolário de um processo de
degeneração política e ideológica do Estado socialista e do
partido comunista.
A queda do grande bastião do socialismo no mundo resultou de

um processo corrosivo gradual, que teve como marco o 20º
Congresso do Partido Comunista da União Soviética, em 1956,
já sob a liderança de Nikita Krushev, que deu início a um
processo de elaboração e aplicação de uma plataforma
oportunista de direita, em contraste com o socialismo científico
leninista.
Aqui vale um parêntese para situarmos a repercussão do

revisionismo de Krushev nas polêmicas entre partidos
comunistas e revolucionários. A regressão foi tamanha que
abalou as estruturas do Movimento Comunista Internacional,
com reflexos em todos os países. Foi notável o cisma,
decorrente da nova orientação soviética, entre a URSS e a
China. E, para não ficarmos em latitudes distantes, vale
lembrar que a orientação krusheviana acelerou um processo de
degenerescência do antigo PCB. Era uma época em que esse
partido tinha reações pavlovianas às decisões soviéticas. A
primeira destas foi a adoção de uma política que pode ser
designada como oportunista de direita, consubstanciada em
um documento que passou à história como a Declaração de
Março de 1958, base para a resolução política do 5º Congresso
(1960), um marco da trajetória do PCB como um partido
reformista que apostou na conciliação com as classes
dominantes e em opções estratégicas e táticas
ideologicamente liquidacionistas que o transformaram em um
partido de centro direita, como o PPS, agora Cidadania.

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