1. There is a sum of material conditions that determine, in the current circumstances of class struggle, a deepening of the peoples’ discomfort, a climate of heightening social irritation, an unhappiness with the socio-economic model of capitalism, and an open and transversal rejection of all political sectors in bourgeois power and enmeshed in the system of political domination as a whole, as well as high levels of mistrust in the political and economic elites, without precedent in recent Chilean history, even soaring above the levels of mistrust present around the People’s Revolt in 2019.
To cite some facts that corroborate this claim, according to studies by Fundación SOL, we’ve seen an uptick of 23,9% in the price of the basic food basket in the past 12 months; pensions for new retirees (who have been investing for 35 to 40 years in their pension funds) amount to 76,7% of minimum wage for half of newly-retired men and to 73,4% of minimum wage for newly-retired women; 42,2% of women who live in Chile live in poverty; the housing deficit at a national level totals 650.000 homes, according to official government statements. At the same time, even bourgeois polls, such as the MORI poll, show that when the population is asked about the feelings that they have towards politics in 2023, 68% say they feel mistrust (coming in first place), 48% feel distaste, and 37% irritation; all of this demonstrates the most negative feelings towards politics in 30 years.
It’s clear that in the circumstances post-Revolt and post-Reject[1], the peoples’ discomfort, unhappiness and hostility is manifesting primarily in conservative and reactionary ways, contrary to how they were subversively expressed in late 2019.
The explanation as to why this sudden shift has happened lies, precisely, in the defeat of a People’s Revolt movement, the resounding failure of the constituent strategy imposed by dominant sectors in 2019 as the only and final possible way to stop the Revolt and channel that energy into existing institutions, and the feeling in the more conservative and reactionary sectors of the right wing of bourgeois power that they triumphed, because they did effectively stifle the People’s Revolt, demobilized the movement and, two or three years later, the pattern of capitalist accumulation (economic system) and the institutional bourgeois democratic apparatus (political regime), as well as bourgeois political institutions (parliament, political parties, the judiciary apparatus) and even the Constitution – which they agreed to sacrifice in order to keep the Chilean Republic alive in November 2019 – all remain perfectly intact.
All of this leads to the current moment, where many sectors of the working class have focused their interests on demands to the State for security and the fight against crime and drug trafficking – a demand that increasingly shows truly warlike traits, with war machines and supplies –, an unusual recovery of social support for the Carabineros and repressive forces with total and absolute institutional support, starting with the Boric government, a growing disapproval of popular mobilization and the exercise of violent and radical protest, a very pronounced rejection of the mobilization and emancipatory causes of the Mapuche People, particularly its autonomist and revolutionary current, a rejection of feminist, pro-abortion and queer demands, a brutal hostility towards immigration, particularly Venezuelan, Colombian, and Haitian, among other similar expressions.
The previously-described circumstance of current popular subjectivity means that the discontent, hostility and violence that we mentioned earlier, in the current circumstances of class struggle, is not fundamentally directed at the institutions, characters and symbols of bourgeois power, as was the case during the Revolt, but occurs instead towards and between the exploited and oppressed; the Mapuche People, migrants from South America and the Caribbean, working women, queer people of the working class, working-class families, children and teens increasingly more abandoned and marginalized from an adequate education, a protected and safe environment, and a system that provides opportunity for holistic personal development, as well as, generally speaking, the totality of social sectors that are completely excluded from commercial society, that enormous mass of the working class that does not even waste time in looking for a formal job and simply subsists on a day-to-day basis, utterly untethered to the fruits of bourgeois society.
It must be said that almost all of that enormous mass, when forced to vote on the proposal for a new Constitution voted to Reject, because it despises the games of those who hold bourgeois power. They don’t believe in it, they don’t feel a part of it, nor have they ever been a part of democracy, and they don’t trust that it represents, now or in the future, concrete solutions to their most urgent material problems. This is part of the theater post-Revolt or counter-Revolt.
2. Regarding the current situation of mobilization backflow, which is fact-of-the-matter for any current events analysis, in this precise moment we think that we can talk about a sort of political depression within the working class and mobilized popular sectors, in the sense that there’s a manifest and persistent mood decline, and social aggression, frustration and impotence are directed, as we mentioned previously, within the working class itself, blurring out the class enemy and retreating to the social perception, momentarily swept and overcome during the Revolt, that the social reality of class is impossible to transform.
That said, it seems relevant to detain ourselves on what, truly and concretely, this phenomenon of backflow and political depression consists of. We assert that in leading sectors of the working class and popular sectors willing to fight against the class enemy in order to transform social reality, there currently occurs at present, momentarily, a phenomenon of enclosure regarding strategic issues, related to the forms of popular struggle sustained through time (as part of a historical process), to lasting forms of popular and class organization with potential for power, to modes of accumulating class forces, to conceptions of the class enemy and the political organization of the bourgeois State, to programmatic and strategic contents of a working-class revolutionary project, etc.
In fact, mobilized popular sectors are indeed stuck in, and, consequently, disconcerted, exhausted and demoralized, a sort of strategic labyrinth, an unsolved strategic crossroads, because of the idea that – based fundamentally on predominating social subjectivity – in late 2019 we struggled with all our forced and all our abilities, putting bodies and lives into a radical struggle with quasi-insurrectional glimmers, and yet did not triumph, and the later attempt to create political change in democratic, institutional, electoral ways through the Constitutional process also failed, with results that in the short and medium term, entomb the prospects of large social sectors previously willing to mobilize. The strategic crossroads, in this historical context, consists in not seeing a common response to how – the paths, the roads, those are the strategies – to attain the social transformations sought after by the sectors of working class in the struggle, willing to struggle, or who support or sympathize with popular mobilization.
3. The new Constitutional process is a political process that, no matter how you slice it, will not allow the groups in bourgeois power to attain their own strategic ends related to the reconstruction of a hegemonic base. That is to say, with the production of certain tools or institutional devices through which the dominant sectors gain – relatively speaking – legitimacy and social validation, even if it is limited to the mere popular perception that those who exercise political power, after all, are the right groups to do so, and carry out political activity as best as possible in general terms within a concrete historical context and direct it more or less, in a sense it becomes the social consensus. With this we are not even speaking of the hegemony of a ruling class as such, but only of minimal devices, means or agents of hegemony that endow the system of exploitation with basic degrees of social stability to function normally. In this sense, together with containing and disarticulating the People’s Revolt, this was a strategic objective of the bourgeois pact for a new political Constitution.
Despite the above, we must consider that, in this moment, an important part of the ruling class and of the most reactionary sectors of the right-wing in bourgeois powr have embarked on a strategy of ideological imposition, of a sort of ideological war against social-democrat and reformist lines within the political system itself, which basically means a program to conserve the bases of the capitalist patter of accumulation and, fundamentally, this bourgeois democratic political regime. Rightly or not – according to their own right-wing bourgeois program – that’s their current strategic position, which is why we can expect these sectors to entrench themselves in a feeling of security, given that they feel fully and definitively victorious with reason and social backing on their side, in that social mobilization and the People’s Revolt were a misfortunate episode, singular, motivated and organized by specific subversive groups, and not an expression of class struggle itself, unleashed in, by, and from the capitalist social system. This is why they conclude that there is no need for bourgeois interest to implement certain reforms in the political system and the pattern of capitalist accumulation, for example, as it relates to the assimilation of indigenous people by the Chilean state, to a defense of “national sovereignty” in regards to available natural resources, or to guaranteeing greater levels of social security in matters of pensions, housing, unemployment, access to food, etc, by the State.
4. In regards to the autonomous Mapuche movement, we must highlight, in keeping with previous readings, a substantial loss of Chilean solidarity towards the Mapuche struggle and, particularly, towards the autonomist, radical, revolutionary current, which favors direct action in land recovery, productive occupation and radical confrontation with the interests of capital and the powers of the Chilean State in Wallmapu[2]. In this context, it must be emphasized that the current government and the governing parties that years ago, whether declaratively or symbolically, offered certain levels of support to the Mapuche struggle, even if only by putting in context the actions of land recovery without justifying them, today direct and execute the most ferocious and superlative repressive policy -police and counterinsurgency- that has been seen since the 1990s in Chile in the context of the repression of the insurgent nuclei of the MIR, the FPMR and the Lautaro.
However, we believe that, in historical terms, there persists a continuity of the expansive phase of the autonomist current for the recovery and reconstruction of Wallmapu, first opened some 20 to 25 years ago. Though today the concrete activity of sabotage and land recovery is at least contained and diminished by repression and the development of police and counterinsurgency policies of the State. The current question is whether this current correlation of forces will be fundamentally a reversible situation in the medium term or whether it will mark, rather, a new historical condition characterized by the beginning of a strategic retreat of the Mapuche emancipatory forces.
5. Finally, despite popular backflow and the situation of political depression prevailing in the popular field and in mobilized sectors, it seems of crucial relevance to highlight that we cannot lose sight of the great number of nuclei and popular groups that are active, especially at a local level, as well as at secondary student level at least within the Metropolitan Region, resisting the prevailing condition of backflow, promoting political agitation and protests and trying to generate popular organization, especially in urban territories, in some cases making genuine efforts to advance in political terms from these concrete experiences of class organization.
That is where we think that there exist, alive, present and current, the conditions for the strengthening and multiplication of the sectors of the class that leads towards what we would call an Autonomous Popular Movement and the deployment of a revolutionary policy with long term perspectives, based on a community development with local roots, expansive capacities, of multiplication or generalization of these experiences, ascending collective aptitudes for the exercises of community and territorial self-management, capacities and intentions to generate relationships and articulations with other territories, initiative, seriousness and maturity to carry forward the exercise of radical mass mobilization in the concrete scenarios of class confrontation, as some of the main components of our political approach.
Our political emphases as Liberación are places along certain strategic horizons towards an accumulation of forces, a development of a revolutionary social force: in the development of a territorial movement, of radical struggle and direct action, of local and community organization within the working class, autonomous from all powers of the State and of capital, as well as diverse popular organizations, from the left and revolutionary in their perspectives, horizontal in their organizational logic, antipatriarchal in all social relations, moving towards a strategic development of Popular Power; of anticarceral politics against political prison, because we consider the destruction of all devices of social control, coercion and repression, and their replacement with educational means, social (re)habilitation, and community support in situations that affect wellbeing to be a fundamental pillar of the program of an emancipated society; of feminist, queer and working class politics, because we conceive of the revolutionary process and of communist society as fundamentally antipatriarchal and anticapitalist, and, in that sense, we put forward completely subversive and groundbreaking feminist current at the heart of the Autonomous Popular Movement, which struggles against all social and cultural anchors of class society, of state hierarches and all types of vertical social relations, of the commands of leaders and authorities in power, as well as the entirety of conservative, cis-hetero-patriarchal customs and traditions; of a policy revolutionary international alliances with strategic and programmatic horizons towards a global communist revolution and a Latinamerican Revolution on a regional scale; and, lastly, of a heterodox concept of a communist revolution, breaking with the 20th century socialist tradition, creative, anti-dogmatic, of a communism of liberation that, from our revolutionary perspective, adds a historical perspective to class confrontation.
¡Strengthen and multiply the Autonomous Popular Movement!
¡Towards communism and freedom!
Liberación, March 2023
[1] Refers to the “Reject” option winning a national referendum on whether to accept or reject a new constitution in 2022.
[2] Wallmapu is the name of the territory belonging historically and ancestrally to the mapuche people.
