The Left scattered, the Left co-opted

By Rodrigo Karmy Bolton

El Desconcierto, 25.08.2017


One of the key differences in the current Chilean political landscape, unlike the prevailing scenario during the second half of the 20th century, is the lack of the "one-third of the left". This "one-third", led once upon a time by Salvador Allende, was constituted and mobilized by the workers and peasants movements alongside progressive middle class actors in their diverse and heartrending struggles. It was the effect of a set of political battles with the objective of removing the oligarchic pact that was sealed with the 1925 Constitution. It wasn't in line with the nature of the Chilean social order, but with a group of forces that gained their space thanks to the configuration of the Popular Unity bloc. Though not all the different leftist currents were part of that bloc, we should consider that the Popular Unity was, more than a representative entity, a surplus to the entire representative system that was based on the oligarchic pact of 1925.

To put it differently, a certain historiography and political science have had a tendency to look at the Popular Unity focusing solely on its party configuration, leaving aside the process that it initiated. But, perhaps, the Popular Unity as an initial process exceeded the Popular Unity as a representative "one-third". Far from being a weakness affecting its own unity, this disparity was its driving force. Beyond the figure of Allende and his electoral strength, there was a wider process which created a social imaginary in which those who had been crushed, forgotten, silenced by the oligarchic pact began to dream of a different way of "living together". Imagination is the constituent power of two -or more- antinomic logics that, however, should and could actually co-exist: the Popular Unity’s social process and its institutional representation. The one existed because of the other, none of them could survive without the other, because the first constituted the source of its strength, and the second its eventual realization. Popular Unity didn’t refer to a homogeneous bloc which was wrapped up in itself, but a field of political imagination, in which the social process and the institutional representation came together and drifted apart, touched and distanced from each other simultaneously. Politics is precisely the power that arises between both logics while preventing them from identifying with each other and, in turn, from dissociating definitely.

However, we already know the story that followed. Faced with the process of political imagination offered by the Popular Unity to remove the Chilean oligarchic pact, the 1973 military coup and the subsequent transition restored this pact in the form of neoliberal capitalism. From then on, the different leftist currents have been suffering from a process of absorption. They are divided into different coalitions in exchange for survival. Sometimes they acquire electoral representation, but they lack any kind of social process from below. Conversely, there are still groups that try to start a process from below, but they run against the wall of institutional representation. Such a division, which the Popular Unity sorted out by opening up the imagination as the means for any articulation, manifest itself in the difference between the social and the political spheres, a difference which is systematically deepened by the neoliberal order.

The gap between the social process and the institutional representation, between grassroots social leaders and professional politicians. A social process without organizational forms and an inert institutional representation. That’s the emptiness we live in. The absorption of certain left currents made them stick to coalitions which they couldn’t influence substantively. In doing so, they emptied their proposals and historical imaginaries. And they may keep on doing so if they continue being divided up among different forces or coalitions wherein they lack hegemony and which make them confront each other: I refer to leftist factions (social-Christians, radical social democrats, socialists, communists, etc.) across the political spectrum, the proposals of which lie scattered and absorbed by the Neoliberal Party. Only this way an articulation like the Popular Unity - though updated for the 21st century - can be possible.

Maybe the conflict unleashed today within the Broad Front bears witness to two symmetrical positions: on the one hand, a Left that wants to win over a certain political "center", and on the other hand a Left that tries to articulate a leftist pole which is nevertheless traditional (i.e., enlightened, developmentalist).
Why should the left try to win over the "center" (why not propose an autonomous path?). Furthermore, why should a leftist pole maintain an enlightened position in which the rest of humanity that doesn’t vote for them, apparently just doesn't have "understood anything?" Perhaps, in this symmetrical game, we can summarize the current problem of a scattered and co-opted Left as follows: on the one hand, a Left trying to win over the center to reach power at the price of losing identity and, on the other, a Left that clings to an identity without being able to reach power; a Left that focuses on being representation and ends up absorbed by the neoliberal technocracy, another that emphasizes being solely a social process (without achieving it) and just ends up isolated, unable to articulate an effective opposition to the oligarchic pact. The first one cannot reach institutional representation (since it is unable to conquer the required “one-third” without the process that should go with it); the second one cannot articulate a social process (since at most it can aspire to an identity which is no longer able to attract the people that it, however, stands up for). Meanwhile, the Neoliberal Party sticks to institutional politics, while the people don't stop voting for the Right.

If the Left renounces to win back its historical place - a place which is neither given, nor natural, nor obvious, but once conquered by the social struggles that took place throughout the 19th and 20th centuries - they will not stop asking themselves: "When will socialism arrive? ", as was ironically written by Mauricio Redolés in his tremendous poem “Tangolpeando”. Thus, it seems that the choice is made between winning over the "center" while its technocracy absorbs us, or continuing to cling to an "identitarian" Left incapable of winning. Remember that this was also the choice of Fernando Atria within the PS (Socialist Party) that ended up as a simple "moral" candidacy and absorbed by the hegemony of the "center" that has long been an active part of the oligarchic pact. As if the Broad Front couldn't but reproduce the same logic of that recent scene. Emptied of their historical content, reducing the strength of their memories to the bureaucratic management (that from time to time may tolerate one of those "moral" and doomed candidacies) - Here the co-opted and scattered leftist currents born and die.
To win the "one-third" of autonomy that was snatched away by the rifles of the dictatorship and the banks of democracy, it will be necessary not to lean towards blind "electoralism", but to the much necessary political imagination. The latter would open a common field in which the different leftist currents, scattered and absorbed by the entire Chilean political spectrum, can unite into a multiple coalition of anti-capitalist stamp (social-Christian, socialist, communist, autonomist, libertarian, etc.) forming a "one-third" which is independent of any coalition dominated by the neoliberal discourse. This way, they can articulate a social process alongside its institutional representation in a single dynamic of political imagination. By the way, such a dynamic implies rethinking communism. However, it is necessary to think about it from within the struggles themselves and their practices. Keeping in mind that, from that standpoint, thinking and imagining are part of the same action. Because when I say "communism" I do not think of a political party, nor do I have the forms of the so called “real socialism” in mind (as the neo-liberal discourse unanimously likes to repeat). I think of an experience of joint imagination   in the form of an active political participation  which promotes practices of use and not of property and which is beyond the political-state bureaucracy and the forms of neoliberal governmentality. Hopefully, the last conflicts that took place within the Broad Front are not a reproduction of the fissures of the Neoliberal Party, but part of a long process of constitution that, not without conflicts (these conflicts will continue coming to the fore), can articulate a active political participation for the 21st century.

Original source: http://www.eldesconcierto.cl/2017/08/25/izquierdas-repartidas-izquierdas-subsumidas/