The tragedy of Chilean electoralism: An interview with Pablo Abufom

Tobias Kohlberger and Michael McClelland

Platypus Review 184 | March 2026

On February 22, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society members Tobias Kohlberger and Michael McClelland interviewed Pablo Abufom, a philosopher, translator, and biologist living in Chile. Abufom has been involved in struggles against neoliberalism in Chile for almost 20 years, as a student organizer, an activist for a new pension system, former director of the political movement Solidaridad, and, more recently, spokesperson for the Coordinadora por Palestina, a coalition of social movements for Palestinian liberation. In 2019, Abufom was a community organizer during the Estallido Social (social outburst) in Chile. His writings on Chilean social and political struggles have been published in Jacobin, NACLA Report on the Americas, Viento Sur, Rebelion.org, Anarkismo.net, Contretemps, and Amandla. An edited transcript follows.

Michael McClelland: Could you tell us about Solidaridad?

Pablo Abofum: Solidaridad is a political movement born in 2016. It was the result of several ideological trajectories coming together, such as anarcho-communism, libertarian communism, critical Marxism, and feminism. It also represented different struggles in Chile that emerged in the 2010s, such as the student movement, community organizing for housing in poor areas of the cities, the labor movement, and some feminist collectives. There had already been a new political moment in Chile after the stagnation of the 1990s. We had the social movements of the 2000s, and then we witnessed a rapid explosion of different mass movements in 2016, starting with activism around pensions.

MM: Were you involved in the pension movement?

PA: Yes, and there were other movements around this time. In 2011, Chile had a huge student movement that followed the 2006 mobilization of high school students.¹ There was a new unionizing movement concerning sub-contracted workers in mining, forestry, and ports. Newly radicalized young people began working within unions and creating different structures. The student movement of 2011 politicized an entire generation — including current Chilean President Gabriel Boric and several of his secretaries and cabinet members. Back then, there was a big debate about what to do next. The social movement was insulated from Chilean society. Although the students’ movements had been able to connect with unions, workers, and community organizations, even going so far as to foment national strikes for public education in Chile, the rest of Chilean society was largely spectating their activity. The majority of Chileans supported the movement, but it was mostly students who actually took to the streets. This also meant that students weren’t able to really change things in a more structural way.

The question “what next?” is key in any such conjuncture. This question did not emerge from a crisis of the movement itself so much as from the awakening of a new generation. Most young people had been born after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet,² which meant that their politicization had occurred under a liberal democratic government, however modern, highly privatized, and capitalist. The neoliberal consensus framed their experience of governance and economics. In attempting to answer the “what next?” question, one of their strategic hypotheses was to form a new political party or front to challenge the two coalitions in Chile that effectively work like a two-party system.

MM: What’s the difference between the two coalitions?

PA: There’s a Center-Left coalition that goes from the Christian Democrats³ on the Right to the Socialist Party⁴ on the Left. Then you have the Right wing, which extends from those who are nostalgic for the military dictatorship to those who outrightly claim that legacy with pride.

MM: Are there many in Chile who regard the dictatorship positively?

PA: Yes, and there’s been a recent upsurge. The face of the New Right is a Pinochetista. It used to be fringe, especially after Pinochet died in 2006 and was found guilty of financial crimes.⁵ People didn’t seem to care about the 30,000 people tortured under Pinochet so much as the fact that the guy stole public funds. However, by the end of the 90s, even Right-wingers were distancing themselves from Pinochet. But, as you know, the Right has recently had a rebirth around the world, manifesting in various ideological tactics to “trigger” the Left. Somebody even made a T-shirt making light of the helicopters that dropped disappeared people into the sea under Pinochet.⁶

Between 2011 and 2014, there emerged two directions in which different Left groups went. One was towards the formation of the party Frente Amplio,⁷ which absorbed anyone interested in electoral politics. There was a pilgrimage in that direction made by the avowedly pragmatic sections of the radical Left. They saw that the social movements were not able to implement change by themselves and so they felt the need for politics, with particular attention to the Constitution. The rest of the radical Left continued organizing at the grassroots level. This ranged from radical Maoists, who thought an alliance between peasants and workers was the answer, to groups involved in social movements and labor and community struggles. Solidaridad was born out of that split of the Left libertarian movement.

MM: How did these 2011–14 protests reflect the global moment on the Left that produced Occupy?

PA: Most popular accounts mention the Arab Spring, the anti-austerity movement in Spain, and Occupy in the U.S., but for us in Chile, we had the student movement in 2011. The students who had occupied the high schools in 2006 were now in college, bringing their tactics and political lessons: they held a highly democratic view of how the student movement should organize itself. They based it more on assemblies and “spokespersons” rather than hierarchical student unions and “leaders.” Most student spokespersons who became famous during that time, like Boric and Camila Vallejos,⁸ were highly controlled by their bases.

There were new questions being asked about neoliberal education concerning profit and privatization, the education’s content and methodology, and broader concerns like democracy within institutions. It was an integral movement consisting of demands and debates between the hundreds of thousands of students mobilizing around the country.

More relevant to our context was the fact that the wave of protests in Chile in 2011 coincided with the progressive cycle of governments in Latin America called the “Pink Tide.” In 2019, we saw a huge movement emerge in Ecuador, and were aware of what was going on in Lebanon, Sudan, and elsewhere. Colombia had protest movements in 2021, and so did Peru in the following year. It’s interesting that such things occur in waves.

MM: Do you identify with Marxism?

PA: I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist, because labels aren’t relevant and because Marx is more useful without the “-ism.” Of course, Marxism as a historical movement has absolutely been relevant for popular or workers’ movements everywhere. I just mean that it would be a problem to follow Marx’s writings like they’re the Bible. When the entire debate becomes merely a contest over what Marx really said, it gets boring and unproductive quickly. Politically speaking, it’s more relevant to read Marx as just one of many intellectuals and militants that have contributed to class struggle throughout the world.

MM: What about when you were younger?

PA: I was an anarcho-punkin my teens. I’ve gone through different phases in my political views. Today, just for fun, I’d call myself a libertarian Leninist — that’s a Daniel Bensaïd⁹ phrase that captures the sense of trying to practice revolutionary realism — starting from reality, not from the ideas. When I was studying philosophy, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx — specifically on Bakunin’s Hegelian youth.

MM: You said at the New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies conference that you were interested in escaping the tendency to view history from a strictly objectivistic point of view. Can you say more about this?

PA: My professor was Carlos Pérez Soto. During the dictatorship, he was a high school physics teacher. He was a member of the Communist Party (PCCh) and later became a Marxist philosopher. He received a deep Hegelian education from a priest who specialized in Hegel. And since he had been a physics teacher, he was rigorous, disciplined, and obsessive in his way of thinking. He developed a particular view of Hegelian Marxism, and a whole generation of young radicals in Santiago were trained in it. Several of us who studied with him became his disciples. I didn’t — because I’m not really into that kind of dynamic — but he definitely had a following. He saved us from postmodernism in philosophy school. The mainstream at our university was post-structuralist thinking — Derrida, Foucault, etc. Soto was key to my philosophical thinking, especially in terms of dialectics. He played a major role in helping us think beyond dichotomies — beyond identity politics versus class, etc. It’s so ingrained in my worldview now that whenever I run into a dichotomy, I immediately snap into Hegelian mode. I just can’t stand dichotomies.

TK: What was Soto’s impact on the broader Chilean Left?

PA: Soto was irresponsible with his ideological leadership in the sense that he created an intellectual following. He wasn’t focused on building anything politically. He didn’t like to engage in practical politics. Unlike other professors who may have had the same level of influence at other universities, he left the PCCh in the early 90s due to major disagreements with the leadership. After that, he stayed away from direct political involvement.

People who studied with Soto — who went to his seminars on Capital (1867) or The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) — ended up going in different political directions; some became purely academic. At least five or six other students were part of Solidaridad, and we were trying to push for a radical shift in our philosophical thinking. But it wasn’t too successful, because people tend to shy away from philosophical debate; they feel insecure about it. He had a personal impact on many people, but he didn’t have a real political impact on the broader Chilean Left.

MM: I wanted to ask about Marxism because in a 2020 Jacobin article, you describe neoliberalism as a “regime of accumulation” — a term associated with Marxism — and nothing less than “a historical necessity that responds to the concrete dynamics of the global crises of capitalism.”¹⁰ But earlier in our conversation, you mentioned “conjunctures,” which implies something broader.

PA: There is a generic concept of crisis that is used by the Left in a permanent way. We are always in crisis because capitalism is the crisis, but that’s obvious. We need to find the concept that is useful for the moment. We need to understand a crisis as a historically specific moment of confrontation between tendencies as well as a process that is based on the fundamental and permanent contradictions of capitalism. This can be expressed as antagonism, or the struggle between collective actors, but sometimes it only expresses itself as one side of the class struggle winning, and merely because the other side of the struggle is not in the fight. The Right is winning everywhere because there’s no socialism that exists to oppose it. It’s a crisis without antagonism, and it is a complex experience for everyone.

MM: It’s interesting that you describe it as an experience. One can experience something, on the one hand, and then one can be said to have gone through an experience. It has both subjective and objective aspects.

PA: Definitely. Objective historical processes express themselves in particular subjectivities, i.e., political subjectivities. There’s a political crisis everywhere in the world right now, and no one is able to answer it. There are easy answers, but none seem useful. I’m thinking here of Leftists who have recently turned to neo-Stalinism, blaming immigration or feminism in order to oppose the “woke Left.” They take their script from the Right, insofar as anti-wokeness is a Right-wing idea.

MM: Are you talking about the American Communist Party?¹¹

PA: Yes, as well as the Sarah Wagenknecht movement in Germany. This idea that the Left has forgotten the working class in favor of identity politics is not true — that’s not the Left; that’s the liberals. Liberalism’s failure doesn’t prove that Leftist ideas are wrong. It just shows that liberalism is not the Left. The Left is working-class politics. When the Left uses Right-wing rhetoric and tactics in the battle of ideas, it concedes to the Right rather than creating a space for itself.

MM: In your Jacobin article, you say that the dictatorship disrupted the Left and left behind a “strategic vacuum,” which manifested as “the lack of a hypothesis on how a revolutionary process will take place in Chile.”¹²

PA: As Bensaïd put it, the Left once had “strategic hypotheses.”¹³ It had insurrectionary urban revolutions, like the Russian Revolution; protracted rural-to-urban war, like the Cuban and Chinese Revolutions; and then there was the socialist democratic revolution of Allende that was more akin to a Gramscian revolution. Allende was trying to make a revolution in the context of a liberal democratic society, in contrast to Russian autocracy.

The coup in Chile destroyed not only the socialist project with its popular unity-based government, but also the Left’s strategic hypothesis of what kind of revolution could be achieved in our country. This was not only because the dictatorship literally killed the Left, but because the transformations that came with it were so deep that it changed the composition of the working class itself. The dictatorship changed the social relations that organized work, education, and even the moral ideals and values of our society. This wasn’t the first time the Left had lost a coherent reference point in Chile. While the PCCh clung to their reference point by following Moscow’s orders, and other Chilean radical movements saw theirs in Cuba or even China, these references would not prove successful for them. Almost 50 years later, we found an opportunity to try to understand this long, exhausting continuity. The political and ideological implications extended from past defeats, like 1973, to any and all defeats that lay in the future.

MM: What continuities do you regard as significant?

PA: One is what I would call the double defeat of the Chilean working class: 1973 and 1988–90. The latter example is complex because it includes not only the 1988 plebiscite to reject Pinochet’s continued rule and his departure two years later, but also the fall of the Soviet Union. On top of the ideological disorientation stemming from the latter, there was the defeat signaled by the end of the dictatorship with its specific kind of democratic transition. This involved an agreement between the dictatorship and the incoming political establishment to preserve the main neoliberal elements of Chilean society (that the dictatorship had brought in) despite Chile’s return to a liberal democratic society with legal parties in Congress. It was a practical and ideological defeat — a disorientation for the revolutionary Left — because it left us without a clear enemy. The whole process — the 20 years of social movements with new demands — peaked in 2019. Facing an opportunity to change the Constitution, we had a chance to reconcile ourselves with the fact that we have been deeply defeated, not only as a people but as the Left. It allowed us to reassess our situation.

For some in Chile, the strategic hypothesis involves armed struggle. For others, it involves radical social struggle via mass movements and protests. But in the past years, we’ve had to come to terms with what Rosa Luxemburg called revolutionary realpolitik. We have to locate a space for the revolutionary Left. This means defining the role of political struggles in building social and working-class power.

Most people on the Chilean Left see the institutions of the bourgeois state as tools to be used or a minefield to be avoided. On the one hand, the reformist Left sees them as tools — they conceive of themselves as leaders who are going to bring change by using the institutions, joining forces with the social movements in a more Chavista way,¹⁴ or a model similar to Podemos or Syriza. On the other, the radical Left marginalizes itself, avoiding political struggle by saying, “no good can come from it,” or, “you’re going to get sucked into the system,” etc. — as far as they’re concerned, politics can only produce betrayal.

We need to go back to basic Leninist and Trotskyist ideas. We have to clarify how to build independent political action for the working class. We have to learn about the use of political struggle not to implement change within liberal democratic institutions, but to rally around a particular program of revolution, taking advantage of visible, recognizable places in which the working class can orient itself politically. Building a party means building a vessel that can be inhabited by the working class like the classic German Social Democratic Party — with its cultural institutions such as theaters, newspapers, schools, etc. taking on a life of their own — but with a revolutionary program. Not just in the sense of managing the unions and winning elections in Parliament.

MM: For Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, the party existed not merely to offer the working class a space for participation, but to provide the means for reflecting on its historical memory.

PA: We need to go back to that idea of the party. If you analyze the past 15 years of revolts and mass movements around the world, you see that some have toppled governments, like in the Arab Spring, while others have pushed for constitutional change, like in Chile. Others still have been able to stop regressive movements by conservative or Right-wing governments, like in Ecuador. But none of them have been able to establish permanent change. There has been a regression, a shift toward the Right, toward neo-fascist and far-Right movements. This is connected with the global economic crisis. Then there’s what some people call the “polycrisis” — a term I don’t really like. There is just the crisis of capitalism.

If history is a totality, or one whole, you also have to understand society as a whole. The problem is that the new generation of activists have been trained differently from their historical counterparts. Whereas young radicals once received their political education from parties, unions, and other autonomous working-class organizations, it now mostly comes from universities. And the way universities organize knowledge — dividing disciplines, using analytical thinking in sophisticated ways — doesn’t always reflect real conditions so much as it reflects the history of intellectual traditions. This is especially true after the 1950s, when there was a horror associated with returning to Stalinism. As a result, the idea of there being a totality became conflated with “totalitarianism.” It’s postmodernism in a way, but the philosopher in me would say it’s the problem of a neo-Kantian perspective. The Left needs more dialectics in general. And when I say dialectics, I mean Hegel and Marx, definitely not the Soviet version of dialectical materialism. That just became a kind of religion, or a mechanistic materialism.

MM: If we’re discussing the transition of radical education from the working class to the university, we can’t avoid the question of identity politics. Absent a working-class movement for socialism, it at least appears plausible that new, non-working-class actors would take responsibility for what you call new strategic hypotheses.

PA: That’s why we need more historical and philosophical education on the Left. If we see identity politics as something that comes from outside the working class, we’re failing to recognize the actual transformation the working class has undergone throughout the 20^th century, and especially in the 21^st.

The problem with “anti-woke” Leftists is that they think workers didn’t have identities before identity politics 一 that they weren’t women, they weren’t queer, they weren’t part of communities that identified as a particular ethnicity or nationality. Identities have been present throughout the entire history of the class struggle. It’s false to say that only economic motivation has been the driving force of class struggle.

Struggle has had many motivations. Even Lenin was clear about this. He said the difference between a union leader and a revolutionary is that the latter wants to see the spark of revolution in any possible conflict in society, whether that means tenants demanding lower rent from landlords or people resisting a new drilling project. If you can’t see the revolutionary potential in connecting these to capitalism, then you’re misunderstanding reality; you’re separating things that are connected from within. That’s why I said the problem with the newer generations — since maybe the late 20^th century — is that education in general now comes from college, a liberal perspective. One of the problems is that the party — as a lived experience of the working class — lost part of its appeal when the working class gained access to higher education. Like I said, in the early 20^th century, working-class parties had their own cultural movements, which declined as industrialized mass culture took root, resulting in both the bourgeoisie and the working class consuming the same cultural products. That shift made it feel almost hopeless to rebuild a fully autonomous working-class culture.

When we talk about identity politics, we have to consider how labor itself — its complexity and its international and national reorganization since the 1970s — has placed greater emphasis on particular segments of the working class, especially those most affected by these transformations. You can say women and racialized communities integrated into the labor market, but in a subordinated way. If you understand identity as a qualification or determination of class, as the way class expresses itself at a particular historical moment, you have to take identity seriously. There’s no way a revolution in New Zealand could happen without the involvement of Māori because they’re such a crucial part of the formation of New Zealand capitalism. In every colonial country, capitalism was built on some form of extermination, subordination, or oppression of other people. Identity is just one part of how we organize the social reproduction of the whole. Part of the Left’s crisis is that we still understand reality in a dissected way, as if it’s made of separate atoms, rather than as a whole with internal complexity, made of contradictions.

MM: This sounds like Georg Lukács’s discussion of what he calls the “contemplative stance” in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923). He describes a tendency under capitalism to regard each particular aspect of the whole passively, as though they are acting independently and autonomously, not as interrelated elements.

PA: One of the common views, especially in the Tankie (Stalinist) scene, is that identity politics is about particularism, while working-class politics is about universalism. But they understand this “universalism” in a minimalistic way, i.e., the lowest common denominator of the working class, which is just “working,” or even worse, simply “having a wage.” That view leaves out a lot of labor that isn’t formally waged.

We need a new kind of universal, and that’s something the Left needs to come to terms with. We need a new, more complex concept of class. Class is not just an economic category, nor a personal or individual trait. Class is a collective subjectivity. It’s a process that produces individuals. We need concrete universals, which means they are made up of their determinations. And those determinations include gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status — because there are not just differences but inequalities within the working class.

An example of this homogenous, universalistic thinking on the Left can be seen with the topic of gender violence. From our own theoretical perspective and experience, we’ve come to see gender violence as violence against the working class. It’s an obstacle to organizing working-class unity. If you see it like that, feminism is not divisive at all when it introduces gender identity, sexual identity, or mentions the inequalities between men and women within the working class. This clears the obstacles to stronger unity. This shows how an abstract universal works compared to a concrete universal. When people say feminists are being divisive, they are the ones causing real division in the working class.

TK: You mentioned how some have learned to live without or against the state, including through armed struggle. I was wondering, in connection to that, about the importance of the 2022 proposed Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile that included the idea of Chile as a plurinational state. It seems to tie into the broader idea of national self-determination, which is also relevant in the context of the New Left and earlier.

PA: The constitutional draft proposed that Chile was a country made of different nations, which horrified the Right — and a lot of people. The idea was to get recognition and regional, political, and cultural autonomy for some indigenous groups in Chile, which included their being able to implement their own systems of justice for issues regarding their own lives in their communities. This was deliberately misinterpreted to mean that Chile was going to be divided into 12 different countries with 12 different systems of justice, and that because you were going to be judged by an indigenous court, you couldn’t defend yourself.

There’s a radical element in the colonial nature of Latin American states and republics that were born out of independence wars against the Spanish and Portuguese, but they remained colonial states, in that their own indigenous populations were subordinated to these national projects that were inspired by the French Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment.

But for the Left, the role of an anti-colonial perspective is to understand how our capitalist republics were built and how they are predicated on specific processes of expansion — like military expansion. In Chile, capitalist expansion toward the South meant taking, expropriating, and using indigenous land. That didn’t happen because they hated indigenous people, although racism was a way to justify it. Expansion toward the North meant stealing land from Peru and Bolivia in the war at the end of the 19^th century. The basis of the Chilean state was a simultaneous expansion toward the South and the North. The main goal was to acquire land for agriculture and mining, to integrate new people into the workforce, and to make them Chilean by force.

Most Latin American republics are predicated on the idea that we are all mixed, mestizo populations. That’s relevant because it’s what distinguishes Latin America from settler-colonial societies like New Zealand or even the U.S., where there’s a much clearer distinction between whites, the original inhabitants, and different groups of migrants. In Latin America, the goal was to make everyone part of a new national identity — something totally new — a mix of the “brave indigenous peoples” and the new Chileans, fighting against the Spanish empire. Aanti-colonial struggles are ways to destabilize the capitalist states in the region. Now the issue is the same as in every other colonial society. What kind of organization of property and land are you going to have in a transformation of this colonial society?

The problem for countries with indigenous peoples is the idea of going back to ancestral land, of community ownership. That ownership is increasingly recognized by the capitalist state 一 and since you’re not destroying the capitalist state, that community-owned land just becomes small property, which leads to the creation of a new class, a new segment of the petite bourgeoisie, or a new peasantry. As long as there’s any form of property, it’s not going to be a socialized economy. That’s the contradiction of anti-colonial movements everywhere. This is why non-indigenous Leftists end up in debates with indigenous groups: there’s no common ground for thinking through these issues.

MM: In light of what we discussed earlier surrounding the notion of a social totality, would that process still remain haunted by the memory of Stalinism?

PA: It would require a new way of understanding social and economic reality. It would require thinking about identities dialectically.

MM: I say this because of the influence upon Latin America of the Third International’s Stalinist Thermidor that emerged in the 1920s and 30s, and the integrated organization and establishment of the idea of national self-determination for indigenous groups, which was contemporaneous with the Black Belt thesis in the U.S.

PA: Yes, and the PCCh was one of the first to enthusiastically Bolshevize itself in the 30s; it imported, assumed, and accepted all the frameworks of the Stalinist Third International. This was significant when it came to understanding indigenous groups as peasants; it was the product of a logic that reduced everything to economic terms. To counter that, the new generation of Leftists completely removed the economic analysis of indigenous groups and understood them only in terms of ethnic identity. But that’s a problem, too, because no group can be understood solely through either ethnicity or economics.

In Chile, there’s little space for debate between the Left and indigenous groups on these issues. No one wants to be accused of racism or of imposing the ideals of the Western Left on the indigenous. But we need a way to have a fraternal, egalitarian debate between revolutionary peers. Inequalities — and the guilt that often comes with them — can’t be allowed to paralyze the debate. We need unity among all movements, even if some indigenous groups don’t identify as working class. Some are, and some are not. Certain parts of indigenous groups are even members of the bourgeoisie — like in the U.S., where some have their own casinos, or in New Zealand, where some are CEOs of corporations.

MM: Who else was influential on the Chilean Millennial Left?

PA: There are others who were much more politically influential, liked Carlos Ruiz, a sociologist from Universidad de Chile who was a key figure in influencing Frente Amplio. He came from a wing of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria¹⁵ that, by the late 80s, recognized the need for political action beyond armed struggle. Ruiz was instrumental in promoting a sociological reading of Chilean society that recognized the transformation of the working class and the political role of the student movement. He focused on the professionalized upper sectors of the working class. This was the product of a school of thought that posited that the working class in Chile had transformed. Because Chilean society was now composed of predominantly middle-income sectors, those sectors were seen as key to implementing change. Gabriel Boric is the end result of that long process.

The problem is that Boric and others weren’t trained, or even raised, in a revolutionary context. Many of these politicians come from upper-class or higher-income backgrounds. They came to understand their role as being the renovation of the political elite. They focused heavily on the student movement and educational reform because they saw education as the site where the system reproduces itself — by shaping new generations, which I agree with, but their reading of Gramsci is still too moderate. They’ve interpreted the cultural struggle — the battle of ideas — as something to be carried out only by people who go to university, by the professional sectors of the working class, rather than involving the working class as a whole in the transformation of its own subjectivity. We end up with New Left parties whose leadership is made up almost entirely of hipsters; they’re the woke liberals.

TK: In the documentary Mi País Imaginario (2022),¹⁶ director Patricio Guzmán portrays Boric and his presidency as a logical outcome. Boric signed the peace accord and played a significant role during the revolts.¹⁷ Why do you think it was historically necessary — or inevitable — that the Millennial Left in Chile liquidated its political horizons with Boric’s presidency?

PA: It wasn’t absolute, but there was a historical necessity to the failure of the constitutional process and Boric’s presidency, especially considering the state of the Left, the condition of the Chilean people, the fragmentation of the working class, the absence of a party, the lack of historical memory, and the sense of strategic defeat. I remember watching Guzmán’s documentary in Spain, right after the 2022 referendum, when I’d been invited by Anticapitalistas¹⁸ to do a short European tour. I remember watching that film and thinking, “this is so naïve.” Guzmán doesn’t realize that this ending was a tragedy. Instead, he presents it optimistically. He was right, but for all the wrong reasons.

MM: Guzmán portrays the Estallido Social like it’s May 1968.¹⁹ It’s interesting that you say that he was living in Paris. He was also friends with French filmmaker Chris Marker.

PA: Guzmán wasn’t alone in optimistically misunderstanding the revolt as a revolution; many did.

MM: What has the Left forgotten about the Estallido Social?

PA: Everything we in the radical Left were hoping for actually took place in a few months. Millions of people took to the streets; thousands self-organized in their communities, forming neighborhood assemblies. Thanks to the constitutional aspect of the movement, people began talking about more than just single issues like wages or the environment, but the whole political system and what kind of society they wanted to live in. It was a moment of rapid politicization of Chilean society and a shift in political consciousness. But during this time, the movement was completely fragmented. The only mass party was the PCCh; thousands of their members were involved in the revolt. But a revolt is not a revolution.

The gap between a revolt and a revolution cannot be traversed once the revolt starts. In order for the revolt to become a revolution, there must be preparation in advance. You need mass political education. You need a clear vision of the society you want. You need organized mass movements that can negotiate or enter into a confrontation with the state or the political parties in the establishment. But in the Estallido Social, nothing like that happened. That’s why, on November 15, 2019 they signed the agreement for a social peace as well as a new constitution that framed a political ending of the crisis. The governing powers wanted to move the crisis to an arena where they could better manage it.

MM: How did you react when that was announced?

PA: It was two days after the general strike that was organized by the big unions, independent unions, students, and other groups. Every social movement was calling for a massive general strike everywhere in Chile. On the night of November 12 we were expecting some kind of reaction from the government. And their reaction was to call all the political parties to sit down and find a solution, eventually arriving in the form of the agreement of November 15. They condemned all kinds of violence, calling for “social peace” and the new constitution. Why “social peace”? Because they thought they were at war.

TK: Which was what Sebastián Piñera²⁰ had been saying.

PA: Yes, Piñera said, “We are at war against a powerful and implacable enemy that respects nothing.”²¹ The Left found the agreement problematic; we denounced it because it didn’t respond to the depth of the political crisis. Rather, it only opened the way for a restricted constitutional process. Although we agreed that we needed a constitutional transformation, it had to be in the context of a democratic constituent assembly and not one made in the image of the parties in the Congress. Moreover, the agreement didn’t allow for issues that needed to be debated, like international free-trade agreements and the definition of the Chilean Republic.

MM: Did it feel like a defeat at that time? Was there a glimmer of hope?

PA: It was contradictory. Everyone on the Left was against the agreement, but the agreement still divided people. The question was, what were you going to do with the new political landscape, the new reality that the agreement created? People who thought there was still enough fuel to take the revolt toward a new stage of autonomous mass protests and transformation were completely against the constitutional process. They preferred mass protests, confrontation with the police, and autonomous organizations in the neighborhoods. There were others who were more realistic in thinking that we didn’t have enough power to abolish this new landscape, that we would have to adapt to it and accept that this new moment represented new ground for political struggle.

There was another division between a more reformist, conformist view taken by the PCCh and the Frente Amplio. They wanted to accept the conditions that were presented by the agreement. Meanwhile, the social movements and some elements of the PCCh thought we needed to change the conditions of that agreement by making it more democratic. Although the Constitutional Convention gained a majority of anti-neoliberal representatives, and at least 30–40% of representatives being mostly Left independents, these were formal changes. We weren’t able to change the character of the whole thing.

The election was both exhilarating and an incredible moment of defeat. We recognized a new moment in Chilean political history, one in which a democratic institution might open up space for debating everything in our country. But, at the same time, the Constitution was restricted in its content and the way it was going to be implemented. The Constitutional Convention had no power to change any existing law. Normally, a constituent assembly has some kind of control over institutional powers. But this wasn’t a constituent assembly, and even if it had been, it would have taken place within the framework of bourgeois democracy in capitalism. That’s why the Bolsheviks, in the end, didn't follow through with the Constitutional Assembly: it wasn’t going to produce change. That enthusiasm at the beginning was completely crushed by the end.

The Right wing was smart. Realizing that they had come out with less than 30% of the representatives in the Constitutional Convention, they started working on the long game, which was the referendum at the end of the process. They began thinking about how to make Chileans reject anything that came out of this constitutional reform, and did so by waging a daily war of continual defamation and discrediting of the Convention, the representatives, and the contents of the draft. They were ultimately successful. By the end of the process, people in Chile were not convinced that the Constitutional Convention was the change they wanted, even though it was exactly what they called for during the revolt.

There was also the pandemic during this time. People’s priorities shifted from social and political change towards more conservative aims like survival and economic welfare. They were isolated, atomized, and scared as hell, and so could be all the more easily influenced by propaganda about the Constitution.

TK: Before the constituent process, communal assemblies, the so-called cabildos, emerged, which, the historian Gabriel Salazar refers to as the most significant form of organization resulting from the revolt.²² What do you think of their contribution as well as limitations?

PA: In the first days of the revolt, people were stuck in their neighborhoods. There was no public transport in Santiago, there was a curfew, and a state of emergency had been declared in several cities. People organized in their neighborhoods. There were at least three kinds of neighborhood assemblies, although the cabildos existed in non-politicized areas and in the richer sectors of the cities — “cabildo” is an old word for a political assembly in the history of Chile and Latin America: it was a council which used to be one of the first forms of political organization during the independence process, like town halls in the democratic history of the U.S. The self-denominated cabildos were more moderate in their aims since the beginning, almost only devoting themselves to debating the constitutional process.

We in Solidaridaddecided that we needed to coordinate as many of the other neighborhood assemblies as possible. We worked with other Leftist groups to create a coordinating coalition of assemblies called the Coordinadora de Asambleas Territoriales (Coordinator of Territorial Assemblies); it coordinated almost 60 assemblies in the metropolitan area of Santiago. We had connections with several dozen assemblies in other cities because we saw that in the assembly movement there was a potential for popular power that was different from everything that we had seen. People were chanting in the streets for the President to resign, they wanted constitutional change and they were reclaiming the legacy of 20 years of struggles. At a particular moment of the revolt, we understood that the assemblies could become political actors; a coalition of assemblies could form a united front with the main social movements, and stand in, in the absence of a revolutionary party, depending on a mixed formula of community power, political groups, and social movements. Sadly, this didn’t happen for too many reasons to explain; it simply lacked the necessary preconditions. Another important reason was that the bureaucrats in the unions didn’t realize the potential of community power and social movements — with the exception of the feminists movement, which had developed a more universal way to understand the problem. Most other social movements were only concentrated on their own things, which is a problem. The labor movement had only one representative in the Constitutional Convention, and was marginal. Thus the working class was represented by the feminist movement in the Constitutional Convention. Even as the feminist movement was promoting these ideas, the labor unions and their bureaucrats still thought that the feminist movement was secondary or a petty-bourgeois, liberal issue. It was the world upside-down.

TK: I understand that Solidaridad is founding a party. What would be the role of a political party for Solidaridad and generally for the Left?

PA: Yes, Solidaridad is part of a party-building effort born in 2023 and called Solidaridad para Chile (Solidarity for Chile). We didn’t propose the name, but rather went with the name that people chose for building a legal structure that could run in elections. You might ask how we went from being skeptical of elections to being involved in a party running in them over the course of 10 years. It has to do with what happened in between: the revolt of October 2019 and the political processes that followed it.

Right after the revolt and during the pandemic, many felt that change was possible. There remained a progressive sentiment in Chile, resulting in the election of various independents who represented the revolt in the Constitutional Convention. The majority of the elected representatives in the Convention were anti-neoliberal. They were known leaders, not only of the revolt, but social movements like feminist and environmentalist causes. The new Constitution drafted by the Convention was to be a highly progressive document — openly transitional in terms of opening the space for intervention of the state into the economy. It would have broken with the way the colonial Chilean state had been built throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It was also progressive in the sense that it was based on the idea of dignity; whether in terms of housing, healthcare, education, pensions, working conditions, etc.

If we had won the referendum on the Constitution, we would have based our efforts on the political struggles resulting from the referendum. Constitutions don’t change things in themselves; they establish the political framework for social struggles that are to arise in future decades. Take, for instance, the constitutional conventions after the Civil War in the U.S. and the reconstruction process that followed. New constitutions occurred in every state as well as on a federal level. However, most of what those articles contained were never implemented and became part of political struggles until today. We formed the analysis in Solidaridad that constitutions are not the goal in themselves, but the political framework for political and social struggle. You have to adopt a revolutionary position in order to pose some kind of intervention. In the local elections, Leftists and grassroots organizers were elected as mayors and council members. We in Solidaridad felt the need to acknowledge this shift and make it part of our work, seeing it as an opportunity even while remaining critical of the liberal framework of the state.

TK: What happened after the Constitutional Convention?

PA: After the Convention ended, the Coordinadora de Movimientos Sociales (Social Movements Coordinator) emerged to unite social movements, Left-wing independents, community assemblies, and grassroots groups. There was a debate around what to do after we lost the referendum. One task was to maintain the legacy of the revolt. We began to understand electoral politics as a tactic that could mobilize people, making people open to a radical program of change. Although Solidaridad was already discussing radical ideas, we needed a socio-political front that was able to bring under one banner the various social movements and political groups that existed on the radical Left — a working-class united front. Sensing an emerging coherence between those who had participated in the social movements, the revolt, and the constitutional experience, we joined the effort to build the party.

MM: How do you place this new orientation towards party-building internationally? How does its emergence in Chile resonate with the crisis and decline of the Democratic Socialists of America after the Sanders moment, with Momentum after Corbyn, with Syriza and Podemos, etc?

PA: They were part of the same moment that produced the Frente Amplio. Just as they opposed nominally social-democratic but substantively neoliberal parties like PSOE²³ in Spain, Pasok in Greece, the Labour Party in Britain, and the Democrats in the U.S., Chilean progressives had their issues with the Center-Left too. But ultimately, these formations wanted to replace the Center-Left, not overcome it. They effectively sought to become the ruling party, which meant conceding to the terms established by the regimes in these countries, and by extension, the global market. In other words, most of these new formations’ criticisms of the political establishments in their respective countries had more to do with a style of governance and an allegiance to neoliberalism than anything substantive. The economic programs of all these formations are not radical compared to the social-democratic parties of the 1950s and 60s. Even so, in Chile, as in Europe or the U.S., there was an effort to return to welfare statism, to dismantle elements of the neoliberal state.

MM: At the New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies conference in 2024, you suggested that nostalgia for the welfare state erases the fact that only a privileged strata of the working class in Western countries benefited from this social democratic “golden age.” Do calls for constitutionally reforming the state share these limited horizons?

PA: Neoliberalism needs to be reframed. Neoliberalism has increasingly taken on a mythical appearance, as though it is reducible to a set of ideas that one day occurred to a few economists capable of influencing Right-wing decisionmakers everywhere. Such explanations don’t account for why neoliberal policies have been implemented by fascist dictatorships such as Pinochet’s as well as the Labour Party in New Zealand a decade later. There has to be a way to connect these pieces of evidence. The only way is to look at the trajectories of each country’s capitalist crisis. In Latin American countries in the 70s, a wave of dictatorships existed in opposition not only to revolutionary, socialist, or populist movements, but also a variety of capitalism.

Latin American countries were trying to develop industrially. Since the beginning of the 20^th century, Latin America had been a source for raw materials, barring a few exceptions like Brazil and Argentina, who were then somewhat industrialized. Countries became centers for exploitation by the British, Americans, and French. But then, in the 1930s, as Latin America developed and capital increasingly accumulated within its borders, progressive Latin American economists tried to understand how to respond to U.S. and European capital trying to come in.

When the traditional bourgeoisie had profited from land rent, there was a growing industrialized sector that saw the need for developmentalist perspectives. Between the 1930s and 60s, those perspectives prevailed, seeing a boom of projects across Latin America. In Mexico, there was an effort to mitigate the most socially and environmentally destructive effects of capitalist economics, but it failed. After all, it isn’t easy to industrialize a country that world powers are constantly converting back into an extractive economy. The U.S. doesn’t need an industrialized region other than itself — they just want economies from which they can extract raw materials and to which they can sell their products.

There was a crisis in global products beginning in the late 60s, which accounts for neoliberalism in Latin America. However there were various social revolutions and workers’ and peasants’ movements that had proven powerful — the Cuban Revolution was particularly influential. Capitalists, in order to implement their required changes, needed radical and violent means of removing them. This explains the subsequent wave of dictatorships —  Brazil in 1964, Chile in 73, Argentina in 76 —and the destruction of various guerrilla movements by the U.S. Neoliberalism was prompted by a need by the national bourgeoisie — in alliance with the international bourgeoisie — to regain their level of profit that was falling.

MM: The slogan of the Estallido Social — “It's not about 30 pesos but about 30 years”²⁴ — demonstrates how the revolt represented a way of confronting a historical dynamic. On the one hand, 1973, the year of Pinochet’s coup, is often treated as a year zero for neoliberalism. That’s the approach Naomi Klein takes in her book The Shock Doctrine.²⁵ But 73 didn’t drop out of the sky. Neoliberalism might have taken a different approach were it not for Allende, who announced, upon his victory in 70, a peaceful road to socialism as an alternative to the way of the 1917 Russian Revolution. What do you make of Allende’s national vision for socialism, and in what way did it resonate with 2019?

PA: As Walter Benjamin would have put it, historical time was shattered in 2019; it was a flash of the past in the present.²⁶ It was a lived experience for those who were both involved in 2019 and had lived during the dictatorship. Their collective experiences of resistance formed a memory in the present, allowing them to return to the lessons of those days. The revolt was an intergenerational process in which the younger generations learned from the older. The military’s presence in the streets again opened wounds from the dictatorship. For some, this meant fear. Many just shut down and stayed in their houses, not wanting to get involved. But it also meant a lot of anger. It was not only the memory of the past, but a memory of the socialist future they had imagined in those days. The revolt served as a reminder that if we were going to return to the 70s in our minds, we needed to look at the future that was imagined then. Recovering the possibility of the future required going against capitalist realism, as Mark Fisher would put it.²⁷

MM: What about the Chilean national perspective and Allende’s vision for socialism in one country?

PA: We weren’t even close to that. The idea of an international revolution is far from the imagination of the Left, let alone a national one. Among groups that do have a sense of internationalism, we have no idea how to build that. Even among the international parties or coalitions — whether the Fourth International or iterations of whatever Stalinist internationals currently exist — there’s no notion of what an international revolution looks like. Even less so now that, on the Right and the Left, national sovereignty appears to be the solution to the crisis of capitalism. On the Right in both Europe and the U.S., there are emerging “protectionist” policies which have less to do with protecting one’s domestic market than consolidating one’s dominance in the global market and closing borders to migrants. On the Left, there’s the idea that sovereignty is key. That's why the Tankies are all about celebrating Russia, China, Iran and now the new governments in Africa that have expelled the French. I’m not saying that that’s wrong, but it’s interesting that national sovereignty is seen as the solution to the crisis of capitalism. We might otherwise understand the appeal to self-determination and sovereignty in the context of a global international revolution.

MM: To what extent was the Left responsible for what happened with Allende in 1973?

PA: There were differences within the Popular Unity and between different Leftist groups about what road to take: an institutional way or a revolutionary way to socialism. Allende’s Chilean road to socialism was a peaceful road of national transformation. It was a radically social-democratic program of national sovereignty over resources, industrialization of the economy, political and economic empowerment of the working classes and the peasants, and dignity in daily life. Everyone in Chile respects Allende as the main figure of the Chilean Left, but it still represents a fairly restricted view of revolution in the context of capitalist society. Even more so now that we’re not even in an economic cycle that would be helpful for a “socialist” project.

The price of the commodities that we sell to the global market is so low that our state completely lacks resources for social spending. Neither a national revolution nor a social-democratic project is available in the traditional Leftist sense because of the absence of these economic conditions. The only meaningful radical option would be to expropriate parts of the economy from the hands of the bourgeoisie. That would involve getting in trouble not just with the national bourgeoisie but also with international corporations that have interests in Chile. That won’t be successful without strong international networks and a shared program — at least on a regional level. There’s no way that Latin America can break with capitalism if it's not on a regional scale.

Socialism in one country is not just theoretically wrong, it’s not even possible in an industrialized society like China or the Soviet Union. This means it’s even less possible in countries that are completely de-industrialized and based on an economy of extracting natural resources, as they’re fully dependent on the global market.

TK: Having organized for Palestine, how do you see the connection to Chile?

PA: Chile has the largest Palestinian community in the diaspora outside of the Middle East: roughly half a million people. It’s based on migration that came escaping the Ottoman Empire, World War I, the Zionist colonization of Palestine before and after the Nakba in 1948. Palestinians were able to establish themselves firmly in Chilean society — both culturally (because most of them came from Christian areas in the West Bank) and economically (because some of them came with money or were able to make money quickly in Chile). Many were already merchants or involved in commerce, and so they had the education to found small businesses which enabled them to accumulate wealth and capital. Some of the richest people in Chile are Palestinian, Lebanese, or Syrian. Palestinians and Arabs in general are recognized as a contribution to the country by the bourgeoisie and the state. Chile officially recognizes the Palestinian state following the partition plan and the two-states-solution in the borders of 1967.

The Chilean Left has been pro-Palestinian since at least the 60s. It would be interesting to know which position the PCCh took in 1948, when the Soviet Union supported the creation of the state of Israel. But generally, the Chilean Left has usually been in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. October 7 opened a new stage of politicization for Chilean Palestinians, as in other countries. It has created a new space for debates about the role of imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism in Palestine and elsewhere. And it has created divisions within the Left regarding the axis of resistance: Iran, Lebanon, Hezbollah, and others. The Syrian question has been a source of conflict among the Palestinian solidarity groups in Chile after the fall of the Assad regime. There is a campist element that believes that the main enemy is American imperialism and Zionism, and everyone that is against them is our ally. For them, North Korea, Iran, and Cuba are the same — it doesn’t matter if they’re killing their own people. Another part of the Palestinian Solidarity movement on the Left thinks that we should take a more internationalist and class-oriented perspective regarding the problem, and that we are not obligated to support Assad or Iran’s government; we need to be with the Iranian people or the Syrian people. It's about self-determination of the people, not of the government.

Since Palestine has become a global issue — an issue or a conflict around which most of international politics and geopolitics as well as the capitalist crisis has been revolving around — if there is World War III, it’s going to start in Palestine, because China goes to the Middle East and NATO and the U.S. will start moving troops towards that conflict. The fate of humankind depends on what happens in Palestine.

There’s no solution in the Middle East without a social and political revolution that can defeat Zionism, the state of Israel, and its allies. There’s no way out. The alternative is the extermination of the Palestinian people, the consolidation of capitalist monarchies, and the Zionist regime of Israel — that is now a friend of all the Alt-Right and far-Right governments and parties around the globe — for generations in the Middle East. Taking sides with Palestine and against Zionism is almost synonymous with taking a stand against fascism and the far Right across the globe.

MM: Any final thoughts?

PA: I’ve been thinking about the continuity of historical processes. How do you explain that Chile’s progressive government, which was elected against a fascist candidate, is implementing the exact opposite of the progressive platform they ran on? How do you explain that both the Democrats and the Republicans in the U.S. have the same solutions to domestic and global issues? Why do they both represent the continuity of genocidal foreign policy not only in Palestine, but the entire world? Why was the implementation of a neoliberal agenda done by both the Labour Party in New Zealand and the communist regime in China? Was it because there was some weird break in history that made the Labour Party neoliberal? Or was it because of the continuities of the capitalist regime and the interests of the bourgeoisie? There’s no free will for political agents, just as there is no free will in general. Seeking continuities in historical tendencies — in the continuities of state policies rather than in any one particular government’s policies — can help us understand some of these problems.

The way to explain the current situation in Chile is not by concluding that Boric is a traitor; it’s a matter of seeing that the historical necessity bearing upon the Chilean state involves the government having a strong anti-immigration policy, reinforcing repressive technologies, and confronting the political and social instability that comes with an economic crisis. We tend to associate a crisis with a moment of breaks and historical gaps, but continuities can intensify in times of crisis, even where it appears paradoxical. That’s why it’s important to recognize these continuities in times of crisis. It’s the only way you can know what historical opportunities we have available. When the revolt happened, I remember thinking that there was no way that there would be a revolution. We weren’t going to get that far because the historical possibilities that we had available at that time were limited. This can only be understood if you try to see continuity. |P

1 In 2006, students in Chile organized large-scale protests against the privatization of public education, occupying high schools with demands to change the law regulating education. This came to be known as the Penguin Revolution.

2 Between 1973 and 1990, Chile was governed by a civil-military dictatorship under former army general Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, ending the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende Gossens that had seen mass mobilizations and social reforms.

3 The Partido Demócrata Cristiano (Christian Democratic Party) was founded in 1957 via the merger of the Partido Conservador Social Cristiano (Social Christian Conservative Party) and the Falange Nacional (National Falange).

4 The Partido Socialista de Chile (Socialist Party of Chile) was founded in 1933, split after the coup of 1973, and reunited in 1990.

5 Starting in 2004, investigations revealed tax fraud by Pinochet resulting in wealth transferred to foreign bank accounts. The revelations destroyed Pinochet's reputation on the Chilean Right.

6 See Uki Goñi, “Amazon pulls Chile dictatorship ‘death flights’ T-shirts after backlash,” The Guardian (December 5, 2019), <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/05/amazon-pulls-chile-dictatorship-death-flights-t-shirts-after-backlash>.

7 Frente Amplio (Broad Front) was founded in 2017 by Gabriel Boric.

8 Camila Vallejos is a member of the Partido Comunista de Chile (Communist Party of Chile) (PCCh) and has been serving as the Minister General Secretariat of Government under President Boric since 2022. The PCCh was founded in 1912 as the Partido Obrero Socialista (Socialist Workers’ Party), and adopted its current name in 1922.

9 Daniel Bensaïd was a French philosopher and prominent Trotskyist who emerged as a key figure in the student movement of the 1960s. Alongside Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he co-founded the Mouvement du 22 Mars, a driving force behind the May 1968 protests in France. He later became a principal theorist for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and served as a philosophy professor at the University of Paris VIII.

10 Pablo Abufom Silva, “Chile: oportunidad histórica y vacío estratégico,” Jacobin (October 19, 2020), <https://jacobinlat.com/2020/10/chile-oportunidad-historica-y-vacio-estrategico/> [our translation].

11 The American Communist Party was founded in July 2024 by the Infrared Collective and Midwestern Marx.

12 Abufom, “Chile: oportunidad histórica.”

13 See Daniel Bensaïd, “The return of strategy,” International Socialism 113 (January 2007), <https://isj.org.uk/the-return-of-strategy>.

14 Referring to Hugo Chavez but used in the sense of the idea of a Latin American anti-imperialism. In this way protests by social movements against debt regulations by international institutions or international investment projects could be understood as “Chavista.”

15 The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement) is a Chilean party and former guerrilla organization that was founded by Miguel Enriquez in 1965.

16 Mi País Imaginario (My Imaginary Country), dir. Patricio Guzmán (Santiago: Market Chile, 2022).

17 On November 15, 2019, the “Agreement for Social Peace and the New Constitution” was signed by presidents of the parties in Chile’s Parliament, excluding the PCCh and some members of the Frente Amplio. Boric signed the agreement as an individual, drawing criticism from members of his party Frente Amplio.

18 Anticapitalistas is the section of the Fourth International in Spain.

19 May 1968 refers to a period of civil unrest in France marked by massive student protests, general strikes involving over 10 million workers, and widespread occupations of universities and factories, nearly toppling the government of Charles de Gaulle.

20 Sebastián Piñera was a Chilean billionaire businessman and two-time president of Chile (2010–14, 2018–22), known for his pro-market policies and controversial handling of social unrest. His second term was marked by mass protests in 2019 against inequality, leading to a constitutional reform process.

21 See “Piñera: ‘Estamos en guerra contra un enemigo poderoso,” DW (October 21, 2019), <https://www.dw.com/es/pi%C3%B1era-estamos-en-guerra-contra-un-enemigo-poderoso/a-50910426>.

22 See Camila Neves Guzmán, Wilson Lermanda Delgado, and Carlos Ibarra Rebolledo, “Interview with Gabriel Salazar: The Role of History in Self-Knowledge and Popular Self-Education,” Revista de historia 30 (2023): 27–52, <https://revistas.udec.cl/index.php/historia/article/view/11195/10166>.

23 Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), founded in 1879.

24 Referring to the rise of the public transport fares by 30 pesos that was the immediate trigger point for the protests in 2019.

25 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2007).

26 See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland, et al., trans. Harry Zohn, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 389–400.

27 See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley: Zero Books, 2009).