By Camilo Parada Ortiz

Automatically translated by AI

On Sunday, November 16, elections in Chile reflected the deep organic crisis of the model inherited from the Pinochet civil-military dictatorship. In a context of growing pauperization of the working class, rising living costs and repressive laws, seven senatorial districts and the entire lowe house were elected. In addition, elections were held to define the future president.

The presidential results, with 99.99% of votes counted, express an asymmetric polarization, where the bourgeoisie and its political representatives radicalize their project towards the ultra-right, the center-left forces oscillate towards a timorous reformism that manages the crisis for the benefit of capital.

The candidate of the ruling party, Jeannette Jara, communist militant of the Unity for Chile coalition, obtained the first place with a meager 26.85% of the votes. Her campaign, aimed at a decaying political “center”, failed to mobilize a popular electorate jaded by the Gabriel Boric-government, which locked the promises of the 2019 Rebellion in a double-locked box. Far from a “re-foundation”, his administration has deepened the neoliberal model, militarizing the Wallmapu, criminalizing migration, applying a fierce security policy against social protest and renouncing to a real tax reform affecting the richest 1%, in other words, he not only limited himself as his concertacionist predecessors to the administration of the model, but responded in an orderly manner, to the story that the right wing and its media put on him.

In the face of this reformism functional to capital, the ultra-right managed to consolidate its hegemony in the opposition spectrum. José Antonio Kast (23.92%), Franco Parisi (19.71%) and Johannes Kaiser (13.94%), in spite of their rhetorical differences, represent organic projects of the bourgeoisie in its crisis phase: an authoritarian capitalism that seeks to restore the rate of profit through a generalized offensive against the working class. Their discourses combine ultraliberal economic adjustment with political authoritarianism, environmental negationism, reactionary patriarchy and xenophobia, appealing to a “common sense” built by decades of dominant ideology.

The second round between Jara and Kast is not, therefore, a clash between antagonistic projects, but the expression of the crisis of the regime. On the one hand, a reformism that has demonstrated its structural incapacity to break with the dictates of financial capital and the IMF. On the other, a far right that promises a more brutal and stark exploitation.

The multidimensional crisis of capital, Creole version

Kast’s eventual triumph is celebrated by the markets -the Chilean IPSA soared 3.1%- because it guarantees the application of a structural adjustment without gradualism. This adjustment will fall on the backs of the working class, but with a particular cruelty on the sectors most oppressed by capital: migrants, with a criminalization that is not only an ideological resource to divide the proletariat, it is the justification for their labor super-exploitation and the denial of their most basic rights, turning them into scapegoats for the capitalist crisis, even when they are used electorally.
Women, whose rights have been historically attacked by the reactionary, conservative and most retrograde sectors, an eventual ultra-right government means a frontal attack on the minimum rights conquered. An agenda that will restrict abortion, will make their work -productive and reproductive- even more precarious and will reinforce the patriarchal structures that confine them to a subsidiary, secondary and unpaid care role, the material basis of oppression, can be foreseen. The focus on the traditional family, announces a setback also marked in the constant propaganda against any gender policy and budget cuts in the field of care, foster homes, policies against violence against women, etc.. Sexogenic diversities and trans children are also endangered by the little that has been achieved as a result of the struggles of dissidence, the project of the ultra-right is intrinsically anti-diversities, it is a project that reflects the worst of sexism, a policy based on hatred. Its “family agenda” seeks to liquidate legal advances in gender identity and reproductive rights, reinforcing the heterocispatriarchal norm indispensable for the reproduction of the labor force and private property; it also calls into question health policies towards the trans/transvestite population, children and retroviral medication programs for people with HIV. The environment, ecology, territories are also in danger, the program of the ultra-right represents predation in its pure state. Absolute deregulation, extractivism without limits and the denial of the climate crisis as pillars of the reactionary dystopia, which sacrifices the society-nature metabolism on the altar of capitalist accumulation and as a response to the crisis of recovery of profit rates. It is also very likely that the opposition to the recognition of native peoples will intensify and their historical demands for political and territorial autonomy will be dismissed, reversing the small advances achieved in previous years, accompanied by a greater criminalization of protest and territorial claims, through an increase of militarization in indigenous territories, as has been seen historically in some conflicts (e.g., the Mapuche conflict), and the use of the military in the indigenous territories, as has been seen historically in some conflicts (e.g., the Mapuche conflict), and the use of the military in the indigenous territories. Mapuche conflict), and the use of laws and policies that violate their human rights, it must be said that the militarization of the Wallmapu was maintained for almost the entire reformist government of Gabriel Boric, with the support of broad sectors of the center-left.

Parisi repeats the dish of the surprise

The candidacy of Franco Parisi, who obtained a surprising 19.71% of the votes, cannot be explained simply as another project of the populist right. It is a symptom of the organic crisis of Chilean neoliberal capitalism and of the historical failure of left reformism. His figure embodies what critical Marxism can characterize as a reactionary populism of a declassed base, impoverished and aspirational sectors, which channel the malaise into populist projects that provide simple solutions, in a way that ends up strengthening the hegemony of capital.

Parisi sells himself as the “anti-caste”, the pragmatic technician who is above the “caviar left” and the “corrupt right”. His campaign, executed with the influencer logic of personal finance, is not a break with the system, but its purest and most contemporary expression, politics as individual entrepreneurship, where ideas are reduced to coaching and structural solutions are replaced by meritocratic self-help recipes.
With a discourse whose leitmotiv is “neither facho nor comunacho”, it seeks to deny class conflict, presenting the political struggle as a fight between despicable elites and an abstract people unified by their suffering and sacrifice. This mystification is functional to capital, since it disarms the understanding of society as a battlefield between exploiters and exploited.

Parliamentary nuances

The nuance to the reactionary euphoria is the lack of an absolute parliamentary majority for the far-right bloc. Although Kast’s Republican Party will be the first force in the Lower House, its bloc of 42 deputies (adding the libertarians and Social-Christians) is insufficient to govern alone. This leaves a breathing space for the reformism of the former Nueva Mayoría and its new partners of the Frente Amplio, in the face of a debacle that could have been greater.

The Creole center-left, architect, in part, of the Chilean “neoliberal miracle”, maintains close ties with the business community and can make itself available, using the old story of the politics of agreements, to make pacts with the ultra-right for the adjustment reforms that capital demands, this has already been seen in other countries where reaction has come to power by means of liberal and representative democracy. History shows that these inter-bourgeois agreements are made at the expense of the social, labor, sexual and environmental rights of the people.

Once again the class struggle

The turn to the ultra-right is the response of big capital to the Rebellion of 2019, an attempt to discipline through fear and repression oppressed sectors that rose up in struggle and were demobilized with the Agreement For Peace and the New Constitution, the pandemic and the institutional exit of the regime to the rebellion, it is all these sectors that we must regroup.

Faced with this crossroads, the strategic task is to rebuild the political independence of the working class and its organizations. The defeat of these new expressions of the extreme right and the struggle against capitalism require a project of popular, revolutionary, feminist, ecologist and internationalist power, that unifies the struggles of the working class, women, diversities, native peoples, migrants and precarious youth. The only guarantee against capitalist barbarism is the conscious construction of a socialist alternative that overcomes sectarianism, is the task ahead of us.

It is important to emphasize that the revolutionary and anti-capitalist left had a rather marginal participation in this process of Chilean elections, which confirm a global tendency: the exhaustion of the reformist cycles and the incapacity of capitalism to offer solutions to its own crises. We know that the electoral dispute is one of the fields of political battle, it is not the exclusive nor the strategic one of the revolutionary left, in this sense the main thing is to prepare ourselves for what is coming, starting from this, the experience of the International Socialist League (ISL), which advances in a dynamic way, regrouping political expressions coming from different traditions, all of them from the anti-capitalist camp, from socialism, of course from the Trotskyism, but not only, also from independent activism, workers, youth, environmental, left-wing ruptures of reformist formations, converging in a common internationalist project, based on a program of deep transformations, anti-capitalist and socialist, with a healthy functioning, on the method of genuine democratic centralism and not purely declatarian, based on debate, on the permanent democratic discussion and collective elaboration to act in reality in a coordinated manner and away from sectarianism and political opportunism. Of course each country has its own particularities and there are no magic formulas, much less transportable from one space to another, however, we believe it is important to explore formulas in the Chilean vanguard, where it is evident that separately, the forces of the revolutionary camp are rather small expressions in this historical moment, added to the fact that outside our organizations, there are other expressions, often inorganic: activisms, movements and individuals that it would be key to bring together and regroup. We are convinced that it is fundamental to unify in a movement, in an organization with muscle, in a unified party of tendencies, on the basis of a revolutionary program, all the expressions of the Chilean anti-capitalist, socialist, dissident, transforming left, in order to turn everything around. That is the road we propose from the Anti-Capitalist Movement, Chilean section of the LIS, in the present task to fight against the ultra-right, proposing a way out from below, from the workers, to change the world from the base.