(Mis)Understanding Defeat: a reply to Jacobin on the Chilean constitutional process

After years of intense protests and upheavals known as the estallido social (social outburst), Chileans voted to draft a new constitution in October of 2020 by a margin of 78 percent to 22 percent. The Constitutional Convention elected as a result of this referendum was dominated by left wing representatives. It seemed inevitable that the reactionary constitution imposed by former dictator Augusto Pinochet would be replaced by one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, which guaranteed a variety of social rights and recognized indigenous autonomy. Instead, the final draft was dramatically voted down in a second referendum in September of 2022. Now, a new body has been elected to replace the failed Constitutional Convention, this time dominated by the far-right Republican Party. It is essential for the global left to learn from this catastrophic turn of events, but a recent article by comrade Marcelo Casals in Jacobin and Jacobin America Latina draws some mistaken conclusions.

Background

Chile has been governed by the constitution drafted under the dictatorial government of Augusto Pinochet for 41 years. The constitution represents a legacy of enormous political violence carried out by a regime which brutally repressed left wing opposition after seizing power from the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in a bloody military coup. Pinochet’s government murdered 3,000 opposition activists and tortured 30,000 more.  The constitution he imposed through a sham referendum in 1980 enshrined a neoliberal economic model and cemented his supporters in power. The least democratic aspects of the constitution were amended after Pinochet departed from power in 1988, but the persistence of a constitution tainted by the dictatorship, which enforced the privatization of healthcare, education, and water, has set the stage for periodic waves of protest in Chile.

The spark for the most recent wave of protests came in 2019, when high school students engaged in mass fare-hopping in protest of the increasing costs of public transportation. When the police began to repress the children, the protests spread to the rest of the population. The demands of the protests grew in proportion with their scope. One of the most popular slogans is indicative of how the protests developed: “No son 30 pesos, son 30 años” (“It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years”). As the protests grew, they incorporated activists and organizations from the labor movement, student movements, and indigenous groups; who added their demands to the general unrest over the state’s neoliberal policies. The protests forced the right-wing National Renewal government of Sebastian Piñera to call a referendum in October of 2020 on drafting a new constitution, which passed overwhelmingly with an approval vote of nearly 80 percent. In December of 2021, Chileans elected Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old progressive activist politician, on the back of promises to deliver dramatic constitutional changes.

Then, on September 4th, 2022, Chileans voted to reject the proposed constitution and keep the 1980 constitution in place. The referendum’s failure was not a shock – opinion polls showed that it was unlikely to be approved. The campaign was marked by a massive imbalance in funding—the “reject” campaign outspent the “approve” campaign by 9 times—and outright lies by the reject campaigners. Even so, the margin of defeat, and the distribution of votes was surprising. Due to a mandatory voting policy, voter turnout increased from 50 percent in the initial referendum to 86 percent in the second. Of these 5.4 million new voters, 96 percent voted to reject the constitution. Even with the increase in voter turnout, the new constitution received around 1 million fewer votes than the original process which initiated the constitutional process. The poorest neighborhoods, typically strongholds of the left-wing parties and which had voted for the constitutional process, voted overwhelmingly to reject. It was a stunning reversal of the previous referendum result, and a significant blow for the Boric government and the social movements that made up the estallido social.

In the wake of this defeat, and in response to criticism of the convention process, the Boric administration has shifted the next attempt at rewriting the constitution in a more technocratic direction. Instead of being written by a directly-elected body, the new draft will be written by a body of legal experts appointed by the Chilean congress, which will be advised by the newly elected Constitutional council. Both Congress and the Constitutional Council are now controlled by the parties of the Right, with the right-wing and populist Republican Party controlling 23 out of 51 seats in the council. Another 11 seats are controlled by other right-wing parties, and just 16 by those of the left-wing.

For Jacobin, Casals argues that there are several objective factors that have contributed significantly to the defeat of the new constitution and the rise of the right in Chile. These include an economic slump resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic feeding into anti-Boric sentiment, and an influx of migrants from Venezuela bringing anti-immigrant politics to the fore. There is no disagreement here. Where Casals’ analysis runs into problems is in attempting to understand where the convention process itself went wrong.

Parliamentary Cretinism

Casals suggests that a primary reason for the new constitution’s defeat was a “conventional quagmire” caused by “the ideological problems that dogged the convention’s proposals.” Casals accuses the convention of advancing “simplistic understandings of Chilean history,” including the notion that the Chilean state has “straightjacketed indigenous ancestral identities.” This gave rise to the least popular of the new constitution’s proposals: the creation of a pluralistic justice system and the introduction of more regional autonomy, which would have “questioned the constitutive unity of the country itself.”

While it is possible to raise objections to regionalism and federalism on a Marxist basis, this is not the argument that Casals raises. Casals is careful to say that indigenous rights and the claims of other oppressed groups are “legitimate banners of the Chilean Left,” but adds that the proposals for a pluralistic justice system that recognized indigenous legal autonomy “left a bad taste in people’s mouths.” The implications of this observation are not spelled out, but the reader is clearly led to the conclusion that these proposals ought to have been sacrificed for a plebiscitary majority. Even if we accept the idea that it was these proposals–and not the lies and misinformation that were spread by the right and would have been used regardless–that sank the new constitution’s chances, this type of electoral calculus represents a betrayal not only of the indigenous people of Chile, who have been the bleeding edge of the struggle against neoliberalism, but also of the very best of the classical socialist tradition. Criticizing the parliamentary socialists of her own time, Rosa Luxemburg says in The Russian Revolution:

As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to a revolution: first let’s become a “majority.” The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority—that’s the way the road runs.

The recent experiences in Chile demonstrate Luxemburg’s argument just as well as that of the Russian Revolution.  It was the social movements of Chile’s indigenous peoples, feminists, youth, and militant workers which exploded onto the scene in 2019 that sounded neoliberalism’s death nell, and ushered in what could have been (whatever its flaws) one the most progressive constitutions in history; not parliamentary maneuvers and electioneering. Indeed, Boric himself became a national political figure only after and as a result of the protests obliterating the political legitimacy of the existing parties. Conversely, it was the betrayal of the social movements by the Boric government, and not his fidelity to them, that led to defeat.

It was the social movements of Chile’s indigenous peoples, feminists, youth, and militant workers which exploded onto the scene in 2019 that sounded neoliberalism’s death nell, and ushered in what could have been (whatever its flaws) one the most progressive constitutions in history.

The mistake of the Boric government and the left-wing convention delegates was not pushing for too much, but in adopting a too-conciliatory posture. From the beginning of the Constitutional convention, Boric has continuously spoken and behaved as if the right, who have never wanted to change the constitution, are in some way partners in a dialogue rather than implacable enemies. Meanwhile, he has expanded the powers of the very same police who brutalized the demonstrators who helped put him in power and continued repression against indigenous peoples. Casals accuses the convention delegates of behaving “as if the country were living in a constant state of social upheaval”, but perhaps if the Boric government and those representatives allied with it had attempted to expand rather than corral the social movements, that would in fact be the case. We can be sure that a referendum conducted in such a context would have had a very different outcome.

“The Chilean Road to Socialism” in Historic Perspective

Even worse than his electoral horse trading, Casals commits himself to a full-throated defense of the bourgeois state. Citing the example of Salvador Allende’s “Chilean road to socialism,” Casals argues that “the state [is] an institutional apparatus that could be conquered, its class biases altered in the pursuit of socialism.” Casals even appears to criticize the convention for its proposal to do away with the upper chamber of the Chilean parliament, which Casals describes favorably as “one of the oldest in the modern world”, and replace it with a new regional chamber for regional representation.

This view has nothing in common with classical Marxism, or, relatedly, with reality. In The Paris Commune, Marx writes that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” This is because the structure of the state itself corresponds to its most basic function: the maintenance of capitalist social relations. Instead, the capitalist state must be smashed and replaced with a new type of state, a workers’ state on the model of the Paris Commune, which can oversee the transition to socialism. 

Marx knew very well that the capitalist state would resort to violence to prevent a workers’ revolution, having lived during the massacre of the Communards by the French state. Nevertheless, it will be useful to revisit the experience of Salvador Allende’s socialist Popular Unity government, which Casals himself invokes, but does not interrogate. While the memory of the enormous achievements of the Popular Unity government, and the sacrifice of those, including Allende himself, who gave their lives in its name should be celebrated, it should not be forgotten that the “Chilean road to socialism” ended in a far more horrific defeat than what the left is experiencing now, with the murder of Allende and thousands of other left wing activists and the installation of a radical, neoliberal military dictatorship.

Allende’s heroic defiance in the face of certain death at the end of his government does not absolve him of criticism for his strategic errors. It was Allende who brought General Augusto Pinochet, the eventual dictator, into his cabinet to appease the Chilean right and potential coup-plotters in the military. This failed maneuver was not simply the result of poor judgment of character, but a direct consequence of Allende’s commitment to the “Chilean”–but really parliamentary and gradualist–road to socialism. As the class conflict in Chile heated up over the course of Allende’s administration, polarization accelerated on both sides. On one hand, capital strikes caused economic havoc, and rumors of military dissension spread. On the other, cordones industriales (“industrial councils” made up of workers) spread to defend the socialist government and to fight the bosses directly. As the threat of a coup loomed increasingly large, Allende, committed to maintaining the existence and legitimacy of the bourgeois state, disarmed the cordones and refused to take action against the reactionaries. Instead, he attempted to appease his own mortal enemies.

The workers of the cordones foresaw where this would lead at the time. In a letter to Allende dated September 5th, 1973 (one week before the coup), the Santiago Regional Coordinating Committee of the Cordones Industriales wrote the following:

Be advised, compañero, that with the respect and confidence that we still have in you, if you do not carry out the program of the Unidad Popular, if you do not have confidence in the masses, you will lose the only real support that you have as a person and governor, and you will be responsible for leading the country not to civil war, which is already well underway, but toward the cold, planned massacre of the most conscious and organized working class in Latin America.

Allende ignored the warning of his worker-comrades. Allende’s commitment to maintaining the fundamental structures of the bourgeois state sealed his own fate, and that of so many militant workers; and it is this “path to socialism” that Casals argues that socialists today should uncritically embrace.

What Now?

Despite the problems with his analysis, comrade Casals makes one important suggestion – that “resistance to the conservative onslaught… could even mean organizing a rejection campaign to stop the passage of a right-backed constitution.” We should go even further. A campaign against a right-backed constitution should not be considered a possibility; it should begin now, without waiting for the new draft constitution to be finished. We know what the result of a right-wing Constitutional Council will be. The Republican Party leader Jose Antonio Kast has openly opposed any changes to the Pinochet constitution – any proposals put forward by his party will only make changes in a reactionary direction. Even if the proposals of the far Right are tempered by the legal panel responsible for writing the new draft, the passage of a conservative constitution will take the problem of a new constitution off the political agenda, foreclosing the possibility of real constitutional change for years to come.

A campaign against a right-backed constitution should not be considered a possibility; it should begin now, without waiting for the new draft constitution to be finished.

The initial constitutional convention process and referendum campaign was characterized by a one-sided propaganda war, in which the right, knowing that they were outnumbered in the convention, used every means at its disposal to demonize the convention delegates and alienate ordinary Chileans from the process, without waiting to see what the outcome of the drafting process would be. The Boric administration has clearly not come to grips with the nature of the right wing opposition, as he continues to beg them to show moderation. As he said after the election, “I want to invite the Republican Party… to not make the same mistakes we made…This process can’t be about vendettas, but putting Chile first.” It will therefore be up to the Left outside of Boric’s governing coalition to confront the reality of the situation and initiate a “reject” campaign.

A campaign against a constitution of the Right could form the basis for a new movement for a progressive constitution independent of the Boric government. Casals is correct to point out that with the ebb of the social movements that made up the estallido social, the Chilean Left cannot continue to behave as if Chilean society is in a continuous state of social ferment. But this does not mean that it should shift to an embrace of the institutions of the Chilean state. Without dreaming that it would be possible to wish a new social outburst into existence overnight, the task of the Left is to prepare the groundwork for a new uprising to go farther than the last while waging a defensive struggle against a constitution drafted by the right.

Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.