Chile

Chile 2013: What is to be done?

Adolfo Castillo

23/01/2013

Opinión

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The presidential and parliamentary elections of 17 November 2013 will constitute a generational moment of political inflection in the prolonged neo-liberal experiment which has been applied since 1973. This inflection, however, will not be exempt from tensions, which in turn will nurture potential conflicts in the future. Let’s examine some of the reasons.

A necessary preamble. Following the agreements between Pinochet and the Concertation(1) concurring in the maintenance of the economic and political order, based on neo-liberal ideology, there began to develop what can be called a systemic institutional, political action, which is to say, operating with an arrangement of the dominant modernizing logic and its instrumental rationality. Every effort to achieve the economic and governability objectives in the post-conflict period was worthy. It is fair to say that the Concertation registered an outstanding performance in this process.

All government and legislative practice was ordered around the factors of power which permitted the reproduction of the machinery which gave life and dynamism to the system of production and reproduction of privileges for those same minorities which shared the spoils of the destroyed state in 1973, and who enriched themselves with privatized public companies, built private universities, appropriated millions in social security contributions and manipulated the stock market mainly for their own benefit, or turned a profit from public education. New converts to the Concertation and players in the new system also shared in the spoils, whether by convenience or by conviction.

Along the same time-line, but in different social strata, an emerging but sustained, non-institutional political action was taking place, in this case arising from autonomous collective action and social movements.

From the same day on which the first post-dictatorship government was installed, political action by actors outside the system began, and thus, the country was informed of environmental depredation, collusion between politics and business, of profit in education, of the demands of the Mapuche and other aboriginal peoples, of the theft of water by companies tied to members of the Concertation and the Alliance(2), of violations of the environment by the State, of corruption in the public service with the acquiescence of the highest authorities, and an unending list of abuses that citizens’ organizations have had the courage to place on the public agenda, in spite of suffering persecution, being treated badly and even forms of violence.

In the political scenario of this year 2013, these two options will have to confront each other electorally, and could differ by nuances, but in essence, will not alter the picture which is developing: on the one hand, there will be systemic conservative political action, and proposals of systemic reformist action; the first, exercised by the parties of business and inheritors of the dictatorship, the second, by the parties of the Concertation which reproduced the neo-liberal model and tried to humanize it without success.

On the other hand, political projects have been forming, emerging in the post-dictatorship period after taking lessons from what was observed. These new actors and their practices, such as the young people grouped together in the Democratic Revolution and the Autonomous Left; PAIS, MAIZ, the Equality Party, to cite the most recent with new practices, locate themselves on the axis of non-institutional political action, even when they should already have confronted the scenario of rules inherited from the dictatorship, retouched but not altered by the Concertation, such as the electoral question.

The election of November 2013 will demand of the potential competitors, whether in the presidential or the parliamentary arena, that they adopt clear definitions in response to a demanding society which said “enough” in October of last year and abstained from giving their votes to the same candidates as always and opted in emblematic cases for citizens’ change, as in the Providencia district of Santiago.

The question which will sharpen the picture will be the confrontation of the two logics and two styles of understanding the politics of the 21^st century in Chile: those which will seek to reproduce the neo-liberal project and its structure of privileges for minorities, or those which will seek to overcome it. It can be supposed a priori that the systemic conservative actors will do what they can from their side to preserve privileges, with a great power for accomplishing that, given the broad resources at their disposal. With respect to the systemic reformist actors, it is still premature to project their behavior, so long as their candidate is not known nor the program which they will carry forward, nor even less who will form part of a possible government.

The options of the first group appear diminished given the low level of citizen approval for the Coalition and its failure to defend its own ideas. The options of the second, which supposedly is a safe bet according to the magic of the opinion polls, are still more uncertain, since no signs are seen of confronting the neo-liberal project in all its aspects, having not understood the voice of the people.

When the option of broadening the political arch to support a majority government is laid out, the systemic reformist actors should extend a hand to the non-systemic political actors, which if realized would bring with it great tensions in the future, since the logic of political action for the two is of very divergent blends.

In consequence, the field of political and social struggle for 2013 is between two projects around a central contradiction: either the neo-liberal project (the economic and institutional order) is reproduced or transformed, or, the contradiction between majority and participatory democracy, and the elitist democracy of a few, is resolved.

The decisions adopted by the active players in the coming months will have to consider, for example, if gaining a seat in the National Congress constitutes an act of legitimation and reproduction of the institutional order or an act of transformation; if forming part of a reform government is reproducing or transforming. And some parties should decide whether to join the conservative project or take up their reformist vocation, or take up their vocation for non-systemic transformation.

Meanwhile, in the streets and in the cracks that are opening in the real world, the proposals which will enable us to retake the path traced out by the founding fathers of the nation, those who struggled for democracy and social justice, will continue to be nurtured.

(Translation: Donald Lee).

- Adolfo Castillo is Academic Director and Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Art and Social Sciences - ARCIS

(1) NdT: The “Concertation” refers to a pact amongst center and left political parties on the basis of which Chile was governed in the post-Pinochet period, up to the election of the current President, Sebastión Piñera, in 2010.

(2) NdT: The “Alliance” refers to a center-right coalition which served as the base for the election of Piñera.

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