![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/07/2.jpg\")
The river Biobío.
\nIn 2019, an uprising broke out in Chile, wresting control of the streets from police and politicians. Eventually, the authorities managed to redirect this momentum into an effort to replace the constitution, itself a relic of the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The attempt to ratify a constitution more aligned with the values of the demonstrators failed, however, illustrating the risks of channeling grassroots movements into seeking change through institutional means.
\n\nAs a result, a resurgent right wing has regained the initiative in Chile, while the left politicians who came to power have subordinated themselves to the market and the police. To this day, Chile is governed according to the constitution that was introduced as a consequence of the military coup. In the following account, members of the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío trace this story through the end of the year 2023, chronicling the consequences of the cooptation of the uprising of 2019.
\n\nPerhaps the moral of this story is that, rather than simply attempting to reform the ruling institutions, the participants in movements for liberation must understand themselves as the ones who must directly implement the changes they desire.
\n\nYou can listen to an interview with two members of the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío in the last episode of our Radio Evasión podcast series about the Chilean uprising of 2019. We note that former Chilean president Sebastián Piñera died in a helicopter accident after the events reviewed below—a case of poetic justice if ever there were one.
\n\n The river Biobío.
\nIn 2023, Chile observed the fifty-year anniversary of the military coup that changed the history of the country in September 1973, establishing a neoliberal laboratory which has served as a model that is still expanding in various corners of the planet. After half a century, the wounds of the past have not yet healed, as the impunity of many human rights violators continues, the Constitution that was drafted during the dictatorship is still in force, and, consequently, there is no official condemnation of the apologies for state terrorism.
\n\nIn the years preceding the commemoration, the political climate was shaped by the process that opened in 2019 with the popular revolt that shook the country for several weeks—a powerful rejection of the decades of precarization that the neoliberal experiment imposed on the lives of ordinary people. Disenchantment with a political class that has been dedicated to deepening this model since the end of the dictatorship and the return of democracy in 1990 turned into anger that flooded the streets with street violence and clashes with the police and military as never seen before. At the same time, spontaneous assemblies emerged in neighborhoods and communities, discussing the possibilities and experiencing politics and social organization in ways that democracy had never offered.
\n\nAlmost a month after the demonstrations began, the entire political class closed ranks against the insurrection and the political parties signed the Acuerdo por la Paz [“Peace Accord”], which included the participation of the new institutional left represented by Gabriel Boric—a showcase that enabled him to raise his media profile, to make a pact with the elite, and eventually, to be elected president. The Acuerdo committed the state to a process of coming up with a new constitution, which was trumpeted by the political class but simply served to rebuild popular trust in the elite, in the state, and in their institutions, which had been discredited since the beginning of the revolt. At the same time, the population once again suffered massive human rights violations at the hands of the police and military, which inflicted 31 deaths and 11,000 injuries, including eye trauma to 460 people as a result of being attacked by uniformed personnel.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/07/1.jpg\")
A feminist demonstration in Chile on November 2, 2019, after the first cases during the uprising in which carabineros intentionally inflicted damage on demonstrators’ eyes.
\nThe institutionalization of popular struggles as a consequence of the Peace Accord exacerbated the natural attrition resulting from weeks of street protests and the isolation and containment measures taken against the most radical participants in the revolt. This lowered the temperature of the streets, so that the movement was ultimately buried during the COVID-19 pandemic via state-imposed mobility restrictions.
\n\nWith the military back in control of the streets, the focus of attention shifted back to traditional politics and the elite skillfully channeled the energy of the revolt into the process of drafting a new Constitution as a way out of the crisis. This has made for a turbulent cycle that has involved constitutional plebiscites, electoral campaigns, and presidential elections in less than three years, with two consequences. On the one hand, it has given new life to the political institutions that the revolt called into question. On the other hand, it has generated a deep exhaustion and even boredom with politics and social struggles among the general population.
\n\nThe latter is the consequence of the past three years. In the constitutional plebiscite of October 2020, a majority of 78% voted in favor of drafting a new Constitution. The drafting of a new Constitution was entrusted to a series of constitutional conventions, comprised of representatives elected in May 2021, most of whom were independent of political parties and more or less aligned with the demands expressed in the street. This convention went to work during a presidential campaign in which the left was in favor of the work of the convention and the right was against it. Gabriel Boric won the presidential elections of November 2021. Yet despite campaigning under the banners of revolt and against the traditional political class, it only took a few months in power for him to show his true face, governing alongside the neoliberal parties and continuing the neoliberal model.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/07/5.jpg\")
Sebastián Piñera addressing Chile in 2019, flanked by military officers. From 1973 to today, both the force of the military and the stratagems of democracy have played a role in imposing neoliberal capitalism on the population.
\nAt the same time, the constitutional convention’s work was hampered by media scandals revolving around some of the drafters. The right wing took full advantage of this with a smear campaign, alongside other misreporting and false information, all aimed at infecting the public opinion with fear of the changes proposed by the constitutional convention. Given that lay of the land, the plebiscite vote to decide whether to approve the new constitution was made obligatory for all eligible Chilean voters. This completely changed the scenario and the projected electoral outcomes, resulting in a surprising and overwhelming rejection of the drafted constitution in September 2022.
\n\nNevertheless, the process had to continue in order to respect the results of the first plebiscite, which had demanded that Chile must have a new Constitution. That meant that it was necessary to elect a second constitutional convention, but this time in a political climate of resignation and popular exhaustion, manifested by less excitement for independent candidacies among the drafters. This diminished enthusiasm for new political voices enabled the political class to safeguard the participation of traditional parties by fixing certain seats in the constitutional convention for members of congress—previously excluded by voters from the first constitutional convention—to join the drafting process. Consequently, the pro-Pinochet right wing won the elections of May 2023 by a wide margin and began drafting the new constitutional proposal in a situation in which most the population was completely disaffected with the process.
\n\nSeptember 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the military coup, in an atmosphere of polarization fostered by the press and, at the same time, widespread popular indifference to the subject as a result of exhaustion with politics in general. In spite of everything, there are still organized groups among the people who held commemorations of the 50th anniversary throughout the country, in a political scenario that still does not close the wounds of the past and in which the worst legacy of the dictatorship—neoliberalism—is still in force.
\n\nIn this environment, the right wing tried to introduce a kind of historical revisionism to whitewash the dictatorship, exemplified by false equivalence that former President Sebastián Piñera made between the military coup of 1973 and the revolt of 2019 on the grounds that they were both moments of democratic breakdown. This explains the reaction of the political class after the revolt and the effort to prevent future revolts by strengthening repressive laws that give more powers to the police. One of these laws is the so-called Easy Trigger Law, which was approved in April and establishes “privileged self-defense”—that is, if a police or military officer uses his service weapon, it will be presumed that it has been “correctly used” when acting in self-defense.
\n\nThis law was followed by the Anti-Tomas Law, which facilitates the evictions of occupied properties and land. It affects thousands of people who must resort to occupying land in order to live, in addition to accentuating the conflict between the state and the Mapuche people seeking to reclaim ancestral lands that have been usurped by landowners and forestry companies. On November 27, three days after the enactment of the Anti-Tomas Law, the Mapuche community Aylla Varela became the first to be evicted after occupying a farm in the commune of Collipulli as part of their claim to these lands.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/07/3.jpg\")
“Solidarity with the Mapuche people.” A poster from the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío.
\nOn the level of symbolism, the new “progressive” government’s support for the forces of repression was already made clear for all to see when Boric took office and kept on Ricardo Yáñez, who had headed the police responsible for repressing the revolt. Once elected, Boric also shifted his rhetoric: in his electoral campaign, he had harshly targeted former President Piñera, blaming him for his responsibility in the repression during the revolt, but as the months went by, he described him as a “democrat.”
\n\nThe model of neoliberal governance has been updated to become more sophisticated in the field of repression; but this is also accompanied by a modernizing of neoliberal extractivism. Under the new government, extractivism has taken on an apparently more environmentalist aspect, but in reality, the capitalist plundering of the country continues, with new forestry projects, lithium extraction, and green hydrogen plants.
\n\nThe year 2023 concluded with the plebiscite of December 17, in which voters rejected the proposal from the second constitutional convention, the one with a right-wing majority—a proposal at least as bad as the Constitution that has been in force since the dictatorship. This is how the constituent process that the political class had opened in response to the revolt has closed—leaving the impression that here, in the cradle of neoliberalism, everything changed so that everything might remain the same.
\n\nAnarchist Assembly of Biobío, Chilean region.
\nJanuary 2024.
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/07/4.jpg\")
\nElon Musk has taken possession of Twitter, claiming he will make it “a common digital town square.” What kind of town square is owned by a single plutocrat? The square in a company town—or in a monarchy. What will this mean for ordinary people who depend on platforms like Twitter to communicate and organize in the digital age?
\n\nWe encourage you to follow us on Mastodon and Telegram and subscribe to our RSS feed.
\n\nThe conflicts that played out within the capitalist class during Trump’s presidency effectively pitted an upstart coalition of nationalists and old-money capitalists (such as the oil lobby) against the partisans of neoliberal business as usual, exemplified by the vast majority of Silicon Valley. If not for these intra-class conflicts, Trump’s effort to consolidate control of the US government for his particular brand of nationalist authoritarianism might have already succeeded. Grassroots movements spearheaded resistance to Trump’s policies and street-level support, but Silicon Valley also took a side, culminating with Twitter booting Trump off their platform in the wake of the bungled coup attempt of January 6. This underscored what had already been clear since summer 2020: Trump had not built up enough support among the capitalist class to maintain his grip on power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/10/28/3.jpg\")
The decisions of the previous administrators of Twitter during the Trump era revealed fault lines within the capitalist class.
\nWhat if Trump had been able to make common cause with a critical mass of Silicon Valley billionaires? Would things have turned out differently? This is an important question, because the three-sided conflict between nationalists, neoliberals, and participatory social movements is not over.
\n\nTo put this in vulgar dialectical terms:
\n\nThesis: Trump’s effort to consolidate an authoritarian nationalism
\nAntithesis: opposition from neoliberal tycoons in Silicon Valley
\nSynthesis: Elon Musk buys Twitter
Understood thus, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not just the whim of an individual plutocrat—it is also a step towards resolving some of the contradictions within the capitalist class, the better to establish a unified front against workers and everyone else on the receiving end of the violence of the capitalist system. Whatever changes Musk introduces, they will surely reflect his class interests as the world’s richest man.
\n\nOf all the social media giants—and despite Trump’s notorious presence on the platform—Twitter’s administrators were arguably less accommodating to Trump’s agenda than those of Facebook or Youtube. Whereas Mark Zuckerberg met repeatedly with Trump and his far-right supporters like Tucker Carlson, and Facebook and Instagram granted far-right demands to ban anarchists and anti-fascists from their platforms, Twitter banned fascists at least as readily as they banned anarchists and other activists. At the time, we speculated that this might be because Twitter was still effectively under the management of some of the original founders.
\n\nHere, we’ll trace Twitter from its grassroots origins as a protest tool for activists to the Musk acquisition, sketching out a history of the capitalist takeover of the internet in microcosm.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1591091630425182208\n\n\n
With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, we see the conclusion of a cycle of innovation and cooptation in the field of communications. In the late 20th century, the dominant political and technological models were monolithic and unidirectional: network television, mass-based political parties. In response, anarchists and other rebels experimented with independent media and underground networks, producing innovative horizontal and decentralized models like indymedia.org. Tech corporations eventually monetized these models as the participatory media of Web 2.0, such as Facebook. Yet from the turn of the century through the uprising of 2020, the lingering horizontal and participatory aspects of the internet in general and social media in particular continued to empower those who sought to achieve more self-determination—witness the “Thank you Facebook” graffiti in Tunisia after the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2010-2011.
\n\nOver the past decade, however, corporations and governments have introduced more and more online surveillance and control. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is the latest stage in a reactionary clampdown with grim implications.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/10/28/1.jpg\")
February 2011: graffiti in Tunis after the fall of President Ben Ali. Photograph by Habib Nassar.
\nMusk and his colleagues see capitalism as a meritocracy in which the shrewdest and most hardworking competitors inexorably rise to the top. Hence, presumably, their own success.
\n\nOf course, if Musk wishes to prove that his success is not just the consequence of privilege and luck—of fortune and good fortune—he could demonstrate this easily enough by giving away his wealth, cutting his social ties, changing his name, and repeating his supposed rags-to-riches feats a second time. If he were able to climb the pyramid a second time without the benefit of growing up white in apartheid-era South Africa (setting aside the question of his father’s emerald investments for now), we might have to grant a hearing to his claims that the market has elevated him on account of his personal qualities—though that still would not show that capitalism rewards the efforts that are most beneficial for humanity.
\n\nAccording to the Silicon Valley narrative, platforms like Twitter are the inventions of individual entrepreneurs, propelled into being by the finance capital of canny investors.
\n\nBut Twitter did not simply spring, fully formed like Athena, from the head of company co-founder Jack Dorsey. In fact, it was a modest refinement of a model already demonstrated by TXTmob, the SMS text messaging program developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protests at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.1 Blaine Cook and Evan Henshaw-Plath, anarchist developers who worked alongside Dorsey at his previous company Odeo, helped refine TXTmob and later took the model with them into the conversations with Dorsey that gave rise to Twitter.2
\n\nIf the unrelenting urgency of social media in general and Twitter in particular can be exhausting, that’s to be expected—the infrastructure of Twitter was originally designed for street communications during high-stakes mass mobilizations in which information must go out immediately, boiled down to its bare essentials. It’s not a coincidence that, despite its shortcomings, the platform has continued to be useful to street activists and conflict journalists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/10/28/2.jpg\")
The good old days, when pro-Twitter graffiti appeared in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution.
\nThe point here is that innovative models do not necessarily emerge from the commercial entrepreneurism of the Great Men of history and economics. More often, they emerge in the course of collective efforts to solve one of the problems created by the capitalist order. Resistance is the motor of history. Afterwards, opportunists like Musk use the outsize economic leverage that a profit-driven market grants them to buy up new technologies and turn them definitively against the movements and milieux that originally produced them.
\n\nWe can identify two stages in the capitalist appropriation of the TXTmob model. In the first phase, a framework that was originally designed by volunteers for the use of ordinary protesters was transformed into a publicly traded corporation, around the same time that the open spaces of the early internet were being colonized by the for-profit surveillance systems of Web 2.0. In the second phase, this publicly traded corporation has been transformed into the private plaything of a single entitled tycoon—with consequences that remain to be seen.
\n\nMusk claims that his goal is to open up the platform for a wider range of speech. In practice, there is no such thing as “free speech” in its pure form—every decision that can shape the conditions of dialogue inevitably has implications regarding who can participate, who can be heard, and what can be said. For all we might say against them, the previous content moderators of Twitter did not prevent the platform from serving grassroots movements. We have yet to see whether Musk will intentionally target activists and organizers or simply permit reactionaries to do so on a crowdsourced basis, but it would be extremely naïve to take him at his word that his goal is to make Twitter more open.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1583225288481046528\n\n\n
Imagine that you do not believe that Elon Musk deserves to have more power over what occurs on Twitter than the roughly 238 million people who use it today. For the purposes of this thought experiment, imagine that you believe that no one deserves to have such disproportionate power over the means via which human beings communicate with each other. In other words, imagine that you are an anarchist.
\n\nWhat can you do to ensure that people can control the technologies that connect us? Can you establish new platforms that answer directly to those who use them? More importantly, can you popularize those, drawing users away from the closed playpens of corporate social media? Can you draw people together in other forums, spaces that can’t be bought and controlled by billionaires?
\n\nEffectively, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter returns us to the 1980s, when the chief communications media were entirely controlled by big corporations. The difference is that today’s technologies are participatory rather than unidirectional: rather than simply seeing newscasters and celebrities, we see representations of each other, carefully curated by those who run the platforms. If anything, this makes the pretensions of social media to represent the wishes of society as a whole more insidiously persuasive than the spectacles of network television could ever be.
\n\nTwitter itself is likely a lost cause, but we should not hastily cede any territory via which we might communicate and organize against our oppressors. In a globally networked world, our adversaries in governments, corporations, and reactionary movements will continue to take advantage of digital technology to act with speed and coordination. We can’t afford not to do the same, even if in the long run we seek much richer forms of connection than anything that digital technology can provide.
\n\nIt’s you against the billionaires. At their disposal, they have all the wealth and power of the most formidable empire in the history of the solar system. All you have going for you is your own ingenuity, the solidarity of your comrades, and the desperation of millions like you. The billionaires succeed by concentrating power in their own hands at everyone else’s expense. For you to succeed, you must demonstrate ways that everyone can become more powerful. Two principles confront each other in this contest: on one side, individual aggrandizement at the expense of all living things; on the other, the potential of the individual to increase the self-determination of all human beings, all living creatures.
\n\nThe good news is that their narrative about where innovation comes from is a lie. Anarchists had more to do with the origins of Twitter than plutocrats like Musk. We can create new platforms, new points of departure for connection, new strategies for changing the world. We have to.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rabble/status/1590853230208376832\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/blaine/status/1591189007798767616\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/PaulbernalUK/status/1587353426484203521\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/stevekrenzel/status/1589700737407549440\n\n\n
We could go back even further to the protests at the summit of the European Union in Gothenburg, June 14-16, 2001, during which some participants organized a “communicationcentral” using a crude program to mass-distribute SMS messages. Everyone could subscribe to the service, but the infrastructure was not decentralized, which made it vulnerable. The police carried out a raid and eight people served a year or more apiece behind bars. Similar raids followed during protests at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul and the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh before the authorities shifted from trying to prosecute those providing information to the general public during protests to targeting those who inadvertently gave away too much information about themselves via social media. ↩
\nAccording to an account by Evan Henshaw-Plath and Harry Halpin, “Although Twitter received early favorable coverage from venture capital magazines such as TechCrunch and an outburst of usage around the San Francisco earthquake in August 2006, it still only had 5000 users—the same as TxtMob—by September 2006.” It didn’t take off until the 2007 SXSW conference. ↩
\nIn October 2019, an uprising exploded throughout Chile. For a while, the police and armed forces lost control. Seeking to placate the rebels, the government announced a plebiscite about whether to replace the constitution, a relic of the far-right dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A majority of the parties in congress drew up a roadmap for this process, calling it the “Agreement for Social Peace.” In May 2021, elections to determine who would participate in the constitutional process were hailed as a victory for “independent” politics—though we expressed concern that this process would chiefly serve to pacify social movements, pointing out that today, it is much easier to rally opposition to a government than it is to make change via state institutions. As it turned out, in the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, a majority of Chileans voted to reject the proposed constitution—shocking many Chilean leftists, who had not expected such a resounding defeat.
\n\nHoping to gain insight into these events, we sent a series of questions to several thoughtful participants in autonomous social movements. Some of them suspended their rejection of state politics to participate in the constitutional process, while others remained outside the process, taking note of the ways that it shaped the possibilities in Chilean society at large.
\n\nLooking on from a distance, the events in Chile strike us as part of a familiar pattern. The institutions of capitalism and the state impoverish and oppress people, precipitating revolt; the defenders of those institutions scramble to channel anger and desire for change back into reforming the prevailing institutions; as they shift their attention to reform and electoral politics, the rebels lose leverage on those who hold power, and the cycle repeats itself.
\n\nIn fact, electoral politics has served to subdue revolutionary movements since the emergence of modern democracy. In France, immediately after the revolutions of 1848 and 1870, elections served to return reactionaries to power; at the apex of the May 1968 uprising, president Charles de Gaulle regained control by calling a new election for June 23. Transformative social change takes place at a different pace than the establishment of majorities. Seeking to legitimize proposals by majority vote—rather than opening up space for experimentation by decentralizing the processes that distribute agency and legitimacy—will always reduce political possibility to the lowest common denominator.
\n\nThe same repressive process can play out even via direct democracy, especially when it becomes separated from the force of revolt that offered it leverage in the first place. Movements that wait to reach consensus before taking action tie their hands from the start, as we can see by comparing different encampments during the Occupy movement. In Bosnia in 2014, an uprising that began with the burning of government buildings ended with a whimper when the plenums that had crafted a proposal for social change discovered that the reconstituted government no longer had any need for reform once the threat from the streets had abated. It seems to us that the transformative process of revolt itself is the important thing to self-organize, not formal processes to achieve social change through the institutions of the state. Anything that distracts us from this priority can only weaken our movements.
\n\nWe still remember how, at the high point of the 2019 revolt, for about a month, Santiago and many other parts of Chile were self-organized via a decentralized network of neighborhood assemblies employing a wide array of decision-making structures. Each one was shaped by the participants, focusing on the matters that concerned them and discussing what could be done immediately with the resources at their disposal. This remains the high-water mark of popular power in Chile.
\n\nAfter the constitution was approved, the cabildos (town hall meetings) began in many of the same spaces. They appeared to mimic the neighborhood assembly format, but focused on discussing the constitutional process. The immediate power that people had experienced in their neighborhood assemblies gave way to a sense that power came from the state—or at least through the state—and that their desires would eventually be fulfilled at the end of a long, orderly, democratic process. (“And you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”)
\n\nComparing the events in Chile with the grim end results of other left electoral victories in Brazil, Greece, and Spain—which admittedly did not go so far as to propose to establish a new constitutional basis for government—it seems to us that anything that draws us back into trying to reform the institutions of power can only sidetrack us and obscure our real proposals by associating them with the inevitable failures of the state. From our perspective, the failure of the constitutional process in Chile is a cautionary tale. At the same time, if we want to foster movements that can reject such compromises and continue building strength through changing circumstances, we will have to innovate ways to make them sustainable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/10.jpg\")
Today, the reigning government in Chile is headed by Gabriel Boric of the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio (“broad front”). Boric originally made his name participating in the same same student movements that he now directs riot police to suppress by force. In this photograph, anarchists confront riot police in Santiago, Chile on September 11, 2022, the anniversary of the day that the dictator Augusto Pinochet came to power.
\nWe’ve edited the responses for brevity and clarity. The original answers will appear in the Spanish version of this article. The photographs appear courtesy of Frente Fotográfico, who write, “The fantasy that the nostalgic Chilean oligarchy of the dictatorship is going to give up its privileges through democratic means has once again led us to defeat.”
\n\nHow would you like us to describe you?
\n\nI am a queer Mapuche anarchist nihilist involved in the rebuilding of an active anarchist library, support for anarchist political prisoners, and neighborhood organizing, focused more on creating encounters and sharpening thought among anarchists specifically, with little faith in “the people.”
\n\nDid you have any hope for what might come out of the constituent process? What was the best possible case?
\n\nThe revolt of October 18, 2019 awakened a great hope for political change in Chile. There were clear demands to change the country’s policies on a structural level.
\n\nSocial unrest was widespread, advancing demands about health, education, the Private Pension System (AFP), basic human rights—which today are inoperative in any modern democracy—gender perspectives, women’s rights, the LGBTQIA+ community, animal rights, ecological rights, and Indigenous rights. The fundamental issue was the need to put an end to the constitution that was created during the dictatorship, which organizes the country as a big company, tying the hands of ordinary people so they cannot do anything to put a stop to resource extraction, corruption, and exploitation.
\n\nThe entire political class failed to appease the demonstrators for several weeks—despite many deaths, hundreds of people mutilated by gunshots, hundreds of people imprisoned. In the face of this, President Sebastián Piñera summoned the political parties of all stripes to create an “Agreement for Peace.” Behind closed doors, they organized to stop the social crisis that was happening.
\n\nThe ruling class and the political class were desperate. The most conservative parties and the left parties agreed that the situation could not go on; they announced that they had decided to call for a plebiscite to decide whether people wanted a new constitution and how it should be shaped.
\n\nThe “Agreement for Peace” rejected any attempt to restrict resource extraction, including water use, mining, forestry, agriculture, and livestock. Of course, these are the main causes of inequality and impoverishment.
\n\nThe cabildos, or popular assemblies, arose in all the territories. They were convened around questions, so that the participants in the constitutional process would know the thinking and wishes of the people. The cabildos were organized by territory or by community. So, for example, there were feminist, ecological, and LGBTQIA+ cabildos, in which any person who felt called could participate.
\n\nThe trap of these spaces was that the political parties structured them and imparted a bias to them. So the questions varied depending on the social classes or territories involved, creating different points of view.
\n\nStill, throughout that stage of the process, there was an atmosphere of citizen cooperation—people began to understand better how everything is organized, how everything is connected between the different institutions, and how this economically affects all aspects of life in a neoliberal system.
\n\nThere was no way to avoid taking a position on the issues that arose with the revolt. The social movements that existed before the revolt strengthened their struggles and many more people became politically involved in confronting various forms of social precarity. In this sense, the fear generated by the dictatorship vanished, opening doors to debate and criticism of the system.
\n\nThe desire to overturn the old rules that govern this country after so many years of political blindness and social apathy—the fact that everyone is talking about the issues that affect us as a society—this is undoubtedly a great achievement, generated by all of the people who took to the streets to fight for a more just society for all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/2.jpg\")
According to Frente Fotográfico, “Since the defeat of the plebiscite, tensions within the center left have been rising, even more so since the Boric government turned dangerously to the right. Likewise, the most radicalized groups have tried to assume more prominence after the defeat of the democratic left.”
\nDo you feel that the popular social movements that participated in the constituent convention compromised their principles?
\n\nThe issue of whether to participate in the constituent process did not generate much conflict. It was clear that this process, which has always been comprised of a select few from the aristocratic and business elite, should include Indigenous peoples, who have always been outside of any state organization and decision-making throughout the history of this and other territories.
\n\nGender parity has always been relegated to the sidelines. We know that there are often women on the right and women on the left. Women on the right are strongly opposed to feminism, but it was also necessary for feminist women to be involved in shaping the laws that will condition the lives of millions of them.
\n\nPeople from the underclass or middle-class sectors, who raised important issues during the revolt, involving the whole population in the future organization of this country—they deserve to be involved in the process, too. I will never believe that legal means are the way to bring about real social change, but I believe that at a symbolic and representational level, this is very important.
\n\nThe participants in the constitutional convention were elected from all the regions of the country, from all the Indigenous ethnic groups, including openly Indigenous ethnicities, as well as people openly opposed to the new constitution. All the social sectors were represented in one way or another. It is important to emphasize that participating in a constitutional convention does not prevent one from participating in other forms of organization.
\n\nOne event that seemed to me to be symbolic occurred on the first day that the convention met at the palace of the former congress. At the opening ceremony, while some were trying to sing the national anthem, other convention members were shouting to demand freedom to the political prisoners of the revolt.
\n\nBecause of the differences between the 155 people who made up the constitutional convention, many of the debates and agreements were public, especially on issues of national interest. There was also a cable TV channel where you could watch the day-to-day process and listen to the declarations and the positions of each participant.
\n\nThis new formula of citizen participation made it clear that the democratic spectacle is useful to subdue social movements, that real change is created in the streets, in the towns, in the workplaces, and in every place where repression takes place, not from the actions of politicians.
\n\nStudents and other demonstrators clash with riot police in Santiago on September 9, 2022, after the plebiscite of September 4.
\nAs the date of the vote approached, what characterized the sides that coalesced around accepting or rejecting the constitution?
\n\nAfter the election of the convention participants, they began to prepare the political advertisements that were broadcast on television and on all the national channels. In these ads, they sought to debunk the fake news that was bombarding social media networks and radio and television channels, urging people to reject the new draft constitution.
\n\nThis campaign showed that the new constitution included housing rights, more resources for health, education, and the elderly, infrastructure for those with disabilities, environmental protections, animal rights, recognizing the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, harsher punishments for corruption, and other issues that the old constitution did not address.
\n\nThe right wing responded the way they always have, with information campaigns based on fear and lies, provoking confusion and delegitimizing the members of the constitutional convention. They spent hundreds of millions spreading propaganda to make people believe that approving the constitution would make things worse.
\n\nThose who lacked a clear political position before the revolt began to doubt the campaign as it progressed—both the proposals and the process. This showed that the dictatorship and the capitalist system have succeeded in creating resistance to change, spreading fear of social policies that would benefit the poorest. Many people believe that the state addressing social problems is “communism” and therefore reject a more equitable constitution, preferring the old one—even though the old one was made with bloody hands and favors private companies.
\n\nThe right wing has always been aggressive in protecting its interests, directly attacking policies that could generate economic support for the lower social classes, justifying the discourse of meritocracy according to which the poor are poor because they want to be poor. They take advantage of the Mapuche conflict to pressure the current government and the constitutional process, claiming that it is not possible to negotiate with the Mapuche people who maintain their stance of confrontation. The polls and the media took the rejection of the constitution for granted from the beginning.
\n\nBased on the results, we can ask ourselves more questions and offer criticisms regarding everything that has happened. Even after a generalized social revolt, the result of the plebescite threw this whole process in the garbage, leaving us in the same situation as we were before.
\n\nIt is really quite shameful as an inhabitant of this country. But at the same time, many of us have never believed in the state. We know that real change emerges in struggle on the front line. We do not participate in their media circus, even less so now that it has been shown how the mass media play their role.
\n\nThousands of people say that their votes were determined by the information they received from the television about the new draft constitution, that they did not agree with some of the points, that they did not want to lose their houses, that they would lose their pensions, that their healthcare would get worse, that they would not be able to access anything private because the state was going to prohibit it… so many opinions totally misrepresenting the actual proposals, demonstrating that the hundreds of millions of pesos spent in this campaign, that the decades of a neoliberal system and more than 500 years of colonization have served to create an ignorant people. In spite of the real data, what really determines what they vote for are symbols, the fear that Chile will become like Venezuela, that the Indigenous peoples will have more value and privilege than the Chilean people. Effectively, people said “we don’t want everything for free, because we are we are the proud offspring of the exploited.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/8.jpg\")
According to Frente Fotográfico, on September 11, 2022, the anniversary of the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power at a cost of countless lives, “Thousands of people marched towards the general cemetery in a demonstration that was marked by clashes between the militarized police and protesters from the black bloc who tried to reach La Moneda [the government headquarters]. From that moment on, the police charged the demonstrators throughout the pilgrimage, until they reached the cemetery, where the cops quickly swept through, even running over the families who were peacefully paying homage to their disappeared.”
\nHave there been examples of projects that continued building their own social power autonomously from the constituent process, or has it been difficult to prevent that process from impacting all projects for liberation?
\n\nIn this territory, there is a strong tradition of popular struggles, including radical left political groups and various strands of anarchism. There are many examples of autonomous projects that have not changed or stopped. The majority of them have only become more determined not to delegate the task of organizing our lives to political parties.
\n\nThe democratic game is only one option. There are many other ways of relating. The defense of our territories, of our loved ones, of our communities, of animals, of our own bodies—this is a daily resistance.
\n\nCurrently, the most important issue impacting the security of the state is the Mapuche conflict, which runs parallel to the social revolt. The Mapuche struggle has its own axis, phases, and demands. The conflict is getting worse every day, the militarization of the Walmapu (Mapuche territory) has proceeded since the first days of the government of current president Gabriel Boric. This shows that all the political campaigns, all the appeals to the government for change, were a farce.
\n\nSince Boric assumed office, right-wing policies have only gained ground in regards to resource extraction treaties such as the TPP-11 (the Trans-Pacific Partnership), forestry, the student movement, and the criminalization of protest via more severe laws.
\n\nLife in this territory will continue to be in conflict. The defenders of life will never cease to confront domination, we will never stop creating networks and spaces where they can never reach, where their where their laws will not guide us and where their beliefs will never have any value. Ancestral energies remain alive in spite of hundreds of years of trying to subjugate us. Weichafes [a Mapuche name for Warriors], anarchists will not rest in building a future based on respect, love, and solidarity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/7.jpg\")
Graffiti in the cemetery in Santiago in which police attacked mourners on September 11, 2022, the anniversary of the coup. It reads “Neither god nor king.”
\nAfter the vote in May 2021, we wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“Some anarchists have suggested that, the 21st century, state power is a hot potato—arguing that because neoliberal globalization has made it difficult for state structures to mitigate the impact of capitalism, no party will be able to hold state power for long without losing credibility.”
\n
Undoubtedly, today’s states no longer fulfill the determinant role they played at their inception. Today, multinational corporations and moguls use the structures of the states for their own benefit. Chile is a social laboratory: in the last ten years, several leftist and right-wing political parties have emerged representing new social sectors. Those of us who participate in these are part of the cycle that perpetuates this system.
\n\nIn this sense, the capitalist system has the advantage of continuously reinventing itself. For example, previously, to be vegan was to be anti-system, anti-capitalist; today, we already know that veganism is one more branch of capitalist development. By the same token, I believe that as some parties become obsolete, new parties will emerge. But the central conflict, the struggle with the state and capital, continues.
\n\nI would like to thank the CrimethInc. team for the opportunity to provide a critical view of the latest processes that affect the territory dominated by the state of Chile and Walmapu, which is Mapuche territory. Thank you for listening to a Mapuche-queer-anarchist-nihilist comrade who believes that life in this society and in the cities, with all its attendant problems, is absurd and meaningless—who invites others to connect with the earth, to create ties and networks of connection, to realize our desire for the world, here and now.
\n\nAn embrace to all those who carry a new world in their hearts.
\n\nStudents drive back an armored police vehicle in September 2022.
\nThe following responses come from an anonymous contributor who was involved in the constitutional convention but has otherwise chosen to remain outside of institutional processes.
\n\nWhat did you hope might come out of the constitutional process? What was the best case scenario?
\n\nWe hoped for something more than what is usually possible in an institutional framework: the possibility of rebuilding the relationships between people and nature. We hoped to de-privatize water, to move towards a more just society. In that sense, despite not achieving those goals today, hope remains. As long as land, water, and nature are privatized, there will continue to be social ecological conflicts [e.g., the struggles against exploitation and dispossession that are exacerbated by extractive industries and mega-corporations consuming resources and destroying ecosystems].
\n\nWe in the social movements remain firm in our programs. From the beginning, we proposed a feminist, ecological constitution and a rule of law designed to protect freedom and well-being.
\n\nThere is a fierce conflict between nationalism and plurinationality. [The concept of “plurinationality” is familiar from Bolivia, where a 2009 referendum ratified a constitution introducing a “plurinational” state, recognizing Indigenous rights and autonomy.] I think that this is where the rejection of the constitution won the most ground: in glorifying a hegemonic nationalist culture, denying the existence of other peoples and identities and shutting down the possibility of spaces where they could exercise their rights of autonomy. There, we lost outright.
\n\nYes, I believe that it will be difficult for this defeat not to have an impact on projects of feminist emancipation, Indigenous liberation, gender dissidence, and the struggle against neoliberalism in general. Still, perhaps it will open the doors to new processes, new forms of collective construction, outside the institutional framework. We will continue to build from the territories [i.e., from the ground up in local communities], through practices of autonomy and self-management, according to a non-institutional logic.
\n\nIn May 2021, we wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“In the 21st century, state power is a hot potato: because neoliberal globalization has made it difficult for state structures to mitigate the impact of capitalism, no party will be able to hold state power for long without losing credibility.”
\n
Were you anticipating the outcome of the vote on September 4, 2022? Why do you think that so many people rejected the proposed constitution?
\n\nI agree about the difficulty of mitigating the impacts of neoliberalism, but also from Modatima1 [the Movement for the Defense of Access to Water, Land, and Environmental Protection—a non-governmental organization including paid organizers], we have made the decision to compete for local and regional government positions and intervene from there.
\n\nSince May 2021, we have seen an onslaught of fascism and the extreme right. In addition to gaining a powerful representation in parliament, they have been able to popularize racist ideas and pressure the government to implement repressive measures, including against Indigenous peoples.
\n\nI always thought there was a chance that the “No” vote would succeed, but never by such a margin. As we have already pointed out, we were not able to confront the lies of the right and reach out to the common people.
\n\nFrom our perspective, the proposal to draft a new constitution for Chile was a concession achieved by the uprising of 2019. Could that uprising have aimed for another goal, with different results? If you could go back to May 2021—or even to October 2019—what would you do differently?
\n\nIn fact, we have many criticisms regarding how the negotiations between the parties were carried out, excluding the protagonists of the uprising. This agreement ended up capturing the forms of political participation within the institutional framework. Today, we have to evaluate whether participants in the social and popular movements made any gains by participating in the constitutional process.
\n\nIf we could go back to the revolt and do things differently, we would be less innocent regarding the communication strategies of the right. We would engage in more popular education about the constitutional process and move towards more participatory and less elitist deliberation.
\n\nI never thought that the constitutional process was a process of liberation. I believe that real transformation takes place elsewhere. Those are slower paths, of popular organization and shifting consciousness. Perhaps the uprising made us believe that we had advanced much further there, and in that, we were wrong.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/6.jpg\")
September 11, 2022: a banner reading “With our memory intact—revenge for the murdered comrades of yesterday and today,” with a list of names including Claudia López, an anarchist murdered on September 11, 1998, under the democratic regime that succeed the dictatorship.
\nHow should we describe you?
\n\nWe are a couple of Popular Educators (Compas Educadorxs Populares) who have been involved for a long time in self-managed education projects, in both free schools and formal schools. Starting years before the uprising, we have been part of the solidarity network supporting Mapuche political prisoners and prisoners from anarchist, autonomous and anti-authoritarian spaces; since the popular revolt, we have been active organizing activities, resources, and support for political prisoners from the revolt.
\n\nDid you have any hope regarding what could come out of the constitutional process—either from the process itself or from parallel effects? What was the best possible case?
\n\nRegarding the first question—before speaking about the constituent process itself and as a preamble to all the questions—let us say that we still retain hope in the popular movement that broke out in October 2019, understanding this so-called estallido (“outbreak”) or revolt as an expression of popular discontent rejecting a model of life that is against life itself. Although the political awareness necessary to analyze this malaise and propose self-organized alternatives is emerging—to the same extent that political organization is appearing among the common people—this revolt takes several forms:
\n\nFirst, an awareness, termed despertar [“awakening”] in the discourse of the protest movement that broke out in October 2019. We feel that discontent appeared more as a reaction to the accumulation of violence and abuse on the part of those in power than as a force unfolding with clarity about how to build a society that would be more just, less oppressive, and more egalitarian in our differences. In that sense, everything was on the table to be debated and reinvented.
\nSecond, an accomplishment of the struggles of various social movements (students, NO+AFP2, movements for decent housing, Mapuche movements, feminist movements, environmental movements) in the sense that they instilled in the collective consciousness—or at least raised the possibility—that we live under a social order that benefits a few at the expense of the majority and that, in its most concrete expression, reduces us to struggling to survive in the rat race, without time to enjoy ourselves, with strenuous work days and transportation to and from work, with debt, without enough space and time to socialize and build community.
\nThird, the possibility that the open space in the streets, in protests, in consciousness, in speeches, and in political practices (local assemblies, councils, and the like) could function as a catalyst to speed up historical time and harvest the underground work carried out by the popular movement and the extra-institutional left over the last 30 years. This could occur in two different spheres—never completely separate, but necessary to distinguish—organization and political-economic.
\nAs far as organization is concerned, the possibility opened up of resuming the thread of history from before the transition to so-called democracy (1990-2019, the transition that was never completed): popular, grassroots organization that walked alongside the revolutionary left and, going further back, to return to the time that preceded the dictatorship, of a union of workers and the construction of popular power that preceded (and perhaps partly explains) the military coup.
\n\nThe councils (cabildos), or assemblies, supported and sustained in the space of street fighting and direct confrontation with the forces of repression, offered another space for building organization and symbolically undermining the foundations of the reigning social order.
\n\nIn the political-economic sphere, the harvest of the revolt consists in giving cohesion to the isolated critiques of the system (of patriarchy, the pension system, inequality in health and education, hydroelectric plants, the dispossession of the Mapuche people, and so on) in order to build an analysis from below revealing the common and transversal elements connecting all of these issues. In other words, a critique of the neoliberal capitalist system as the root cause of all of these issues, and of the fundamental problem—the loss of meaning that we are experiencing as a people, which became so clear to us all on October 18, 2019.
\n\nThe widespread use of the Mapuche flag in the protests, the growing appreciation (prior to October 18, 2019) of the Mapuche culture and other cultures originating from these lands as seen in murals, the widespread use of certain words, costumes, and practices—we believe and perceive on a more subtle level that this corresponds with the profound desire to return to the earth, the breathe in peace, to live in harmony with those around us through mutual support and conversation. This also implies that, although we speak of threads that are taken up again, there are also new understandings based on the historical experience of this territory and at a global level, which imply questioning and recreating more horizontal forms of organization, calling into question capitalism and its patriarchal and colonial roots, in order to place ourselves in reciprocity with the land and all living beings—to refuse to participate in the race to increase production/exploitation of life on earth without a thought for the life and culture that this machine demolishes. Perhaps this also means revisiting an older narrative, one which has always been in the stories and culture of the first peoples of this land.
\n\nOf course, this last point could be interpreted as an idealization of the movement of October 2019. It is important to emphasize that we are talking about a force that is beginning to emerge and spread into the collective consciousness, but it is still only tiny seedlings that peek into the sunlight, not the ancient forest of the earth’s wisdom reborn, not yet.
\n\nAfter this great preamble, the answer itself: the constitutional process was an agreement carried out by the Chilean political caste.3 This agreement that was formulated on November 15, 2019. We consider it primarily a concession that the constituted powers considered necessary to preserve their position. Of course, their positions and motivations were diverse and, to be sure, those in the most reformist sectors (somewhat on the left) within institutional political spaces did not see this as a concession but as an achievement. Nevertheless, in a more general sense, this was something completely undesirable for the traditional right and the “second” right (the former Concertación, the compromise the emerged from the end of the dictatorship) and desirable for the pseudo-left of institutionalized politics (some of the people from the ex-compromise/New Majority and part of the Frente Amplio, “Broad Front”). A separate case is the Communist Party, which was excluded from the negotiations but actively participated in the process.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/5.jpg\")
September 11, 2022, Santiago, Chile.
\nExplain the problems with the agreement of November 15.
\n\nFirst, it saved President Piñera and his government, who were hanging by a thread in those days, having already sacrificed the minister of the interior, his cousin, Andres Chadwick.
\n\nSecond, the agreement ignored, and in the short term deactivated, the emerging organization in the territories. Instead of fostering popular organization and taking advantage of the momentum to transform political practice into one that genuinely seeks to foster and represent a solid social base upon which a project of profound socio-economic change could be based, the political caste designed a process that once again moved the problem to the electoral level, sustaining a political-advertising logic.
\n\nThird, the two sectors of the right wing skillfully (and the pseudo-left clumsily) designed a constitutional process that met the conditions so that, in the end, the transformation would be minimal and favorable for the economic right (possibly what we are experiencing now). This served to reverse the transformative forces and return everything to the reactionary status quo.
\n\nFrom this point of view, although there was hope that this process of constitutional change—regulated by the same elite that has propagated the model of profit with minimal social rights—as one more possible path to follow and not to dismiss a priori, we are certain that the paths to real transformations do not abide by the timelines of the institutions or their mechanisms and representative procedures, which serve to depoliticize rather than to foster participative political culture.
\n\nLet’s see… now we will review all of its specific limitations:
\n\nWhat does this imply? It takes a long time to design a process within a time constraint; there is time pressure from the very beginning, which increases bickering and errors, and offers valuable content for the media (which are dominated by the economic right in collusion with the Concertación that put an end to left-wing media in the 1990s) and social media with which to plant the idea that those in the convention do not work, that they are lazy, that it is a circus in there, and so on. This generalizes individual actions and ignores the arduous daily work carried out by many participants, who were defenders of territorial and social organizations facing serious environmental and exclusion problems.
\n\nIn addition, the need to reach such broad agreements led to “Frankenstein” solutions in order to keep different sectors happy, so that that many of the sections of the newly proposed constitution do not appear to have a clear and coherent vision and seem to be simply a collection of unrelated parts with the intention of pleasing everyone. The endless negotiations imposed by the two thirds quorum on top of the short timeframe impaired the quality of the new constitutional project; the Rejection campaign used this to conceal its class interests so they could disguise their critiques as merely technical (as we often see technocratic neoliberals claim to be non-ideological and objective).
\n\nOur vision, from the beginning, which was refined in our own reflections and nurtured by the reflections of other organizations, was that the convention was a space ceded by the existing power, which effectively opened up space for certain political positions that have been excluded from the hegemonic political conversation for the last thirty years. Instead, we saw a space that was deliberately and cunningly designed to demobilize the movement (with the exception of the political caste, which took this time to reorganize), to dilute and draw out the discussion, severing any connection with the period of the uprising (thanks in large part to the pandemic and the isolation that came with it), leaving exposed weak points in the constitution by design that would delegitimize it, water it down, and finally lead to it being rejected (which was accomplished in the end).
\n\nFor us, the constitutional process at least had the potential to offer (within the terms which were allowed by the institution) greater levels of protection for nature, which had been devastated in our country (as in all countries condemned to the category of “Third World” that survive on the exportation of raw materials to the global economy) and an improvement in social rights, which can have a real impact on people’s quality of life and undermine at least one aspect of the economic system (even though it did not take down the model of accumulation at its core), as state subsidies tend to give priority to the public state sector when it comes to social rights, opening the doors to end ISAPRES (the system for provisions in private health) and AFP (private pension funds insurance). And of course, it is necessary to mention reproductive and abortion rights as well as animal rights and environmental protection.
\n\nAll of this was implemented by a right-leaning parliament with a pseudo-leftist group who came to an agreement before they won regarding how to move the constitution to the center in order for it to gain approval, with transitional regulations that would impede the effective implementation of some of the most important aspects of the new constitution. Despite being better than what currently exists, in political terms, it skirted the argument, beginning from a lowest common denominator in social, political, and economic aspects. Perhaps the greatest change this new constitutional project would have introduced would have been establishing a right-wing social state without changing the system of accumulation; this might have deepened awareness of the necessity of making changes to the economic system, since guaranteed rights are useless without the economic backing which would enable the state to put them into effect.
\n\nWith respect to the groups that participated in the constitutional convention: I think that it is important to be self-critical as a popular social movement. Although much can be said about certain groups individually to evaluate their actions, there was an inability to work in unison, not only within the convention, but also in critically analyzing the process and taking actions and making denunciations accordingly. This involved both individual and collective egos, the splintering within the most radical left, the prioritizing of individual projects over more structural societal issues that impact a range of demographics, and a lack of understanding that many of the ideas that were put forward in the proposed constitution not only didn’t represent much of the population, but also weren’t understood by them, as they were topics foreign to the conversations and daily experiences of the majority of people immersed in a neoliberal society. In conclusion, more than giving up on their principles (which in some cases was already in motion and had been imposed, whereas in other cases, we saw that people didn’t actually adhere to the principles that they claimed to espouse) it seems to us that cohesion was rendered impossible by the vulnerability of the left and some of the popular social movement to infiltration and destruction from within (as was the case with the “Lista del Pueblo,” the coalition of independent candidates that participated in the 2021 elections to the constitutional convention), the difficulty of building a popular organization due to the onslaught of neoliberalism from the 1980s until present, and a certain dogmatism, puritanism, and messianism from some of the groups, which all claim to possess an uncompromising truth, as if pigheadedness were the greatest revolutionary virtue.
\n\nPerhaps this discourse seems bitter, but we feel it is necessary, as the enemy will always look to weaken and destroy us. We aim to find, within our own actions, the origin of our failures, even if they are institutional and don’t respond to the logic of the political practices that mobilize us, since we are situated in the social landscape and the understanding of the people, of which we are a part. This is what guides us on our collective path and makes it possible for us to take action to transform certain conditions of our oppression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/1.jpg\")
Carrying a Molotov cocktail, a demonstrator approaches Chilean riot police in September 2022.
\nAs the date of the vote was nearing, what positions emerged around “no” (reject) and “yes” (approve)? And on the other side, were there examples of grassroots social movements that managed to continue building autonomously outside of the constitutional process, or was it difficult to avoid the impact of this process even in autonomous projects?
\n\nThe multiplicity of the aspects contained in the constitution, paradoxically, led to the multiplicity of critics. Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals came together in rejecting the new constitution, since it established the right to abortion.
\n\nThe proposal for plurinationality faced a formidable smear campaign from the right as well as a failure to establish what this would mean in the popular understanding, which led to a revival of nationalist and racist sentiment. One example of how the contradictory versions of this conversation took shape in the minds of the public was the speaker who, clearly partial to the rejection of the new constitution, told a story about her son not getting accepted into a public kindergarten in order to give the spot to a Mapuche child. Across the institutional political spectrum, the media reproduced the idea that Indigenous peoples would become a privileged group and characterized political violence against capitalist forestry extraction in Wallmapu as terrorism.
\n\nThese same tropes were applied to the migrant population, which media narratives associated with the increase in crime. We experienced another example of these false narratives when an adult female student in one of our education spaces, asked about the consequences of the 2019 social uprising, referred to migration and people from Venezuela being given priority in access to jobs.
\n\nOn the other hand, after the approval, the majority of those who had historically supported the Concertación (those of the “30 años,” the thirty years since the fall of the dictatorship) lined up. At least in the eyes of the people, an important part of the social movement unrelated to institutional politics and often critical of the Concertación and even more to the left than Frente Amplio also joined. But in practice, this appeared to represent a historical continuity of the Concertación and the eternal lure of the “lesser of two evils” (as we saw with politicians who were in favor of approval saying that they did not believe in the new constitution, but it was either this or Pinochet’s constitution).
\n\nThe right was camouflaged like never before. They cherry-picked people from the supposed center-left (Christian Democracy and others from the ex-Concertación), and some pathetic remains of the world of junk culture and intellectualism in order to carry out their chameleon-like exercise of concealment, which is where a group who called themselves Amarillos por Chile (“yellows for Chile”) comes in. Even former President Piñera and candidate J. A. Kast were hidden during the campaign in favor of “common people” “without a party” (or from the “Center Left”) who “only want the best for Chile,” stating that the constitution that was to be drafted should be a “house for everyone” and not this new “partisan” constitution (in the words of former President Lagos, a fervent supporter of Chile signing the TPP, who received a standing ovation from the entire business community at the end of his term).
\n\nAs always, the right puts on a piteous face and warns that any new path would mean a direct descent into the abyss. The new element this time around was that the argument did not focus solely on anti-communism or on supposed ideological differences in which every social right would be characterized as “extremist,” or that it sought to create the greatest possible transformation (when in reality, they would be minimal concessions in a subsidiary state). However, the right also pointed more to a technical question, claiming neutrality and apparent temperance in its opinion, supporting this narrative with the faces of the center-left, right, and apolitical, affirming and installing in the collective imagination the belief that a new constitutional process would be able to draft a better constitution. Finally, they started spreading catchy slogans without any argumentation or explanation, like “This thing sucks” or “Not like this.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/4.jpg\")
September 11, 2022, Santiago, Chile.
\nFollowing the vote in May 2021, we wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“Some anarchists have suggested that, in the 21st century, state power is a hot potato, arguing that due to neoliberal modernization it has become difficult for structures of the state to mitigate the impact of capitalism and that no political party will be capable of maintaining state power for long without loosing credibility.”
\n
Personally and collectively, we have built a path which has more to do with autonomy than it does with taking state power. That said, this doesn’t imply indifference or neutrality regarding the positions of political movements at an institutional level or a lack of acknowledgment of the impact that they have on the positive or negative sentiments with respect to the strengthening of the popular movement.
\n\nThe question of taking the power of the state in the 21st century in particular (but also in the 20th century) depends largely on the levels of consciousness within society, among the people, and—absolutely tied to consciousness—the degree and quality of political organization. Any political project that aims to seize power from the state must confront the means of reproduction of capital and, in order to achieve deeper changes, should be prepared to resist the offensive of national and international capitalism and its pressure mechanisms. This offensive can have effects on the economy and thus on the lives of the people, as we see in Bolivia.
\n\nThis requires a political organization that has an impact on the process, that is well informed about what is being done and why, that feels supported, protected and genuinely listened to through real participation mechanisms and that, in turn, is sheltered in the community-organization space and sustained by ethics and motivations beyond immediate benefit to themselves or their families. All of these have been undermined by the neoliberal model, which has been in a crisis in Chile for the last ten years but has not been replaced by another practice and political discourse: there is a consensus of discontent, but how to interpret this discontent is a fertile ground for conflict and outright manipulation.
\n\nHave you seen evidence of a political change in Chile since the elections in May of 2021?
\n\nThere hasn’t been profound political change, because the convictions and interpretations aren’t profound (even if discontent is). We see an effective manipulation, which was planted on November 15, 2019. Conversely, we have seen the establishment of the “reject” vote as the dominant opinion, chiefly in the popular sectors, due to a disinformation campaign based on defamation and lies with a very high budget—carried out by traditional media and social networks adopting big data analysis strategies and fake news.
\n\nThe arrival in the government of Gabriel Boric and the identification of his government as supporters of the “Approval” vote was not very helpful. The automatic transmission of the popular opposition to whoever holds the position of president (regarding the thesis you raised, with which we agree, we remember how, in 2021, Piñera’s support plunged as low as 6%), on top of unpopular measures adopted by the government and a climate of fear and insecurity (crime, deliberate increases in inflation from the Central Bank, and the pandemic) both real and fueled by the mass media and digital networks—these created the perfect ecosystem for the “reject” campaign to triumph, since it has been gaining strength by leaps and bounds as individualism and social fragmentation reestablished themselves in the wake of the 2019 uprising.
\n\nFaced with a choice between the certainty of at least continuing as we were or the uncertainty of change, in the absence of a sustained collective program, people’s strength and decisiveness were compromised. In this sense, there appears the idea that the huge degree of uncertainty over the past few years partially caused the subsiding of the confidence that had been garnered from the uprising and the impulses towards transformative social change.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/3.jpg\")
September 11, 2022, Santiago, Chile.
\nDid you anticipate the results of the September 4, 2022 vote? Why do you think so many people rejected the proposed constitution?
\n\nBetween the two of us who are writing these reflections, one expected that the constitution would be approved by a narrow margin and the other anticipated from June onwards that the “reject” vote would win. The huge demonstrations for the “approve” vote and a study conducted by Big Data a few days before the plebescite predicted a win for “approve,” which made us unsure who would win the days leading up to the vote… but one of us definitely thought that “reject” would win.
\n\nI think that the “reject” campaign won because they had a strategy. They planned their victory (or failing that, a weak win for “approval,” undermining its mandate) starting on November 15, 2020. The pandemic weakened the revolutionary will that predominated until February 2020; the fear, uncertainty, and isolation wore down the spirit of the people.
\n\nIn May 2021, [in the elections to the constitutional convention], the “approve” vote won the majority, although it did not yet have any content and it was also partially supported by the traditional right, who started changing their discourse when they realized their disadvantage, like Trojan Horses (another highlight of the strategy of the right) cynically supporting “approval,” knowing beforehand that they were merely there to make the case for the “reject” campaign, this technique we already mentioned of feigning impartiality and apoliticism in order to change sides.
\n\nOn the other hand, we also think that a certain naïveté on the left and within the popular social movement also played a role in the loss, as well as the social disconnection of the more passive part of the population that does not usually vote. When the vote became obligatory, it incorporated a social group with whom there were no common political, social, or organizational ties. There was also a lack of experience in the institutional field, which stems from the fact that it does not make sense to pour out one’s own forces in an electoral process, and a general misreading of the situation. On November 15, the movement had the strength it would have needed not to reject compromises with the political caste, but it seems that thirty years of experience were not enough. Repression was also strong—young people were losing their eyes systematically, hundreds were killed and tortured in police stations and there were rumors circulating about a potential coup de etat.
\n\nIn other words, the movement was pushed into a constitutional process without the political and social organization it needed, without prior discussions to coordinate criteria and formulate analyses and strategies with which to approach the process in such a way that the result was an expression of the popular struggles to achieve legitimacy and validity—for example, by means of an intermediary plebescite that would accept or reject particular proposals or ways of participating in the process of drafting a new constitution.
\n\nSome within the left attribute the victory of the “reject” campaign to some of the politics assumed by the government of Boric. We agree with some of these arguments (such as not allowing the withdrawal of funds from the AFP), but unfortunately, we believe that the detention of Hector Llaitul, leader of the CAM [Coordinadora Arauco Malleco, a militant Indigenous organization seeking Mapuche autonomy] and the repression of students were not relevant factors in determining the results. After a brief faltering of the continuity of the hegemonic narrative, the press regained their power and influence over the population in the final months of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 (until COVID consumed the entire news cycle) and reestablished the well-known discourse of “reject” by a large portion of the population (including the “progressives”) who were against all manifestations of political violence, both from students and from autonomous Mapuche groups, labelling anyone who employed political violence as criminals and delinquents (and sometimes terrorists). In this way, they managed to demobilize and undermine the strategies of the groups most interested in transforming the economic model. Thus, Boric’s government took on the character of containing these transformative social forces, just as we anticipated.
\n\nFrom our perspective, the proposal to draft a new Chilean constitution was a concession won by the October 18, 2019 uprising. Is it possible that this uprising could have pursed other goals?
\n\nI want to stress that the uprising was not a cohesive movement of a previously defined political force, but rather a heterogenous social force, without representatives, programs, or the leadership of political parties. It is necessary to keep this in mind in order to comprehend that what the movement wanted is something that can be traced back and deduced through discourse, emerging political practices, and symbolic elements, but there is no program that can be tracked and read that necessarily represents the movement. (Even fascist-nationalist groups claimed and welcomed the October rebellion, for example.)
\n\nIn our view, there was a process of strengthening organization and communication, a reworking and proliferation of ideas at a grassroots level, and critical lessons developed by sectors of the social and popular political movement during the last decades. In this sense, the goals of the people (which may or may not have included a new constitution) should arise from the popular movement itself, which means expanding, strengthening, and developing cultural and relational work within and between social and political organizations. This was all centered on the possibility of a sustainable transformative project with a real social base, with its feet well planted in the soil of the territories in order to resist the attacks of capital, and nourished from the roots of a people that builds and liberates itself. Symbolically, burying the Pinochet constitution provided the possibility of making a clear break with the neoliberal policies it enshrined and integrating the various struggles into a common goal. Now the question of how to generate these transformations has become a difficult step in approaching social maturity, which requires revisiting the same questions of personal and individual accommodation as they apply to the large sector of people who are less convinced.
\n\nIf you could go back to May 2021—or even October 2019—what would you do differently?
\n\nMaybe we would go back to November 2019 and try to get everyone not to accept the agreement, instead looking for paths forward that could strengthen the organizations, popular power, and autonomous direct actions without the pressure of institutional power. Now, if the movement had accepted the agreement anyway, we could have tried to strengthen the conversation from there, as well as the discussions prior to the constitutional convention, in order to advance a clearer and more unified proposal for the new constitution: both involving the key aspects that it should include as well as the sort of procedures necessary to ensure that more people would participate in and identify with the project. And from there, we could generate spaces for information, communication, and group learning that would have made it possible to understand the complex legislative language that lends itself to numerous interpretations and thus gave space for confused and erroneous ideas.
\n\nHave the results of the plebecite changed your analysis regarding which strategies will be most effective for liberation and social change?
\n\nIn broad terms, it has not significantly changed our analysis, when it comes to our own political practice, but we do feel a greater urgency to continue to invigorate the spaces we described above; we consider this to be equally necessary after the results of the plebiscite. Without a doubt, the electoral processes that have taken place since the popular revolt of 2019 have served to discipline genuinely subversive political currents, channeling political expression into a representative framework of agreements in which questions are defined by power groups and limited to consultation via vote, and all of this takes place by the least direct route, which has the effect of demobilizing the population. Even as we are still evaluating the recent results, we ask and challenge ourselves: “How do we sustain a radical social dialogue which, on one side, enables us to participate in political processes, debate, and discussion about the basic rights of the people, while on the other, enables us to reveal the limitations and superficiality of ‘representative democracy’ as a giant machine intent on dampening social revolutionary processes in order to maintain the status quo?”
\n\nStarting from the political structure of the “state,” and even more so in the global capitalist neoliberal context, makes it incredibly difficult to achieve transformation and the liberation of the people. The story that repeats itself is one of assimilation, co-optation, and increasing domination; progressive movements often allow and encourage this (sometimes even more than the right itself). We acknowledge the reality of the state and we do not mean to devalue authentically leftist groups that fight for social change from within the institutional sphere of political power, but our vision is to strengthen territorial autonomy in terms of thought, culture, resources, and health, undermining the very foundations of power, demonstrating its artificiality and its way of creating needs and addictions. We recognize that institutional changes impact social and cultural processes, which is why we are neither indifferent nor neutral, but this is not how we approach work or transformation. The institutional struggle has demonstrated its limitations, at least in this phase of the development of consciousness.
\n\nPerhaps there are other strategic issues that we will see more clearly once this stage of the process is over, such as the necessity to confront the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism, the possibility of creating a counterculture that it has a greater scope. We also foresee the necessity of establishing genuine dialogue between those who identify as part of the revolutionary left, especially those who do not engage with the institutions. The usual propaganda and criticism, mutual defamation, and invalidation of differences renders dialogue more difficult.
\n\nIn order to form a sense of collectivity, we should value humility, wisdom, freedom of expression, being a good guest and a good host, caring for and developing the sort of expression that builds bridges and validates our differences, compassion and the ability to see the virtues within every person and their individual, genealogical, and ancestral sufferings, which run through us all and cloud our judgment. That is to say—we should listen to, care for, and accompany each other more, practices that enable us to build a collective sense. We consider all of these things important for getting together (without creating a hegemony) towards a common horizon. The construction and practice of a culture and ethics which comes forth from the earth and is nourished by the sky.
\n\nDemonstrations in Chile on September 11, 2022 rejecting the legacy of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and remembering Claudia López, among others.
\nThe following reflection from the streets of Chile appeared on our podcast in November 2019, only a few weeks into the uprising, in response to the original proposal for a plebiscite introducing a constitutional process. It still strikes us as a wise response.
\n\nOn November 15, a majority of the parties in congress approved a more specific deal for how the plebiscite will be run, calling the deal “The Agreement for Social Peace.”
\n\nThere was some anxiety in the movement that this concession would finally placate a critical mass of people in the streets. Some of the popular assemblies and cabildos, or, colonial style councils, started to orient their discussions around a new constitution. Even some politicians were encouraging cabildos. I was nervous that what Piñera couldn’t achieve with the iron fist of the military, he was achieving with the velvet glove of democratic potential. I was wrong though. The most important slogan of the movement arose to the surface again, just like it had with previous concessions like Piñera’s tablescrap social reforms, the cancelling of the metro fare hike, and when he fired his cabinet: “Aún No Ganamos Nada” or, “We Have Won Nothing Yet,” basically a call to keep filling the streets, to not settle for scraps, to keep fighting for dignity.
\n\nThere’s a spectrum of opinions within the movement about the demand for a Consitutional Assembly. Most anarchists, for example, see it as a distraction and a way for the state to recuperate the legitimacy that it has lost. On the other hand, I think Piñera’s announcement did actually surprise people and give them a sense of their power—a plebiscite to decide whether people wanted a new constitution is totally historic. That wasn’t even on the table during the 1988 plebiscite that ended the dictatorship. However, I think most of the popular assemblies and people in the streets, including some anarchists, see the process Piñera proposed as illegitimate because they don’t see it as leading to a “true” constitutional assembly, and a “true” constitutional assembly means all kinds of different things to different people.
\n\nJust to give you a taste of what this sounds like, here’s the communiqué about rejecting the “Agreement for Social Peace” from the neighborhood assembly in Plaza Bogotá:
\n\n\n\n\n“We wholly reject this agreement. The content and proposal of this illegitimate ‘agreement’ do not seem motivated towards generating a consititutional process that is representative and participatory for the people, rather, it simply reproduces the old form of making deals that benefit the elite. We do not accept any constitutional process that doesn’t work towards truth and justice—we say NO to impunity. We demand that President Piñera step down immediately, having been the chief politician responsible for multiple violations of human rights. Our assembly considers any agreement without a solution for the current needs of justice and dignity to be an illegitimate agreement.
\n\n“We will self-organize a people’s plebiscite in coordination with other regions and neighborhoods. We will work to build horizontal links of organization and coordination with other self-organized popular assemblies toward the goal of holding a people’s plebiscite that can be carried out in different areas and, through this, we can freely and sovereignly self-determine what it is the people actually want in a new constitution.
\n\n“We will not give up the streets. We will keep protesting actively in our territory since we believe that the struggle must go on in order to demonstrate our rejection to the imposition of the state and its institutions onto the current process of social constitution in the streets.
\n\n“We call on the people to reject this agreement, in which we weren’t invited to participate or form, which is presented to us today as an exit from conflict. Furthermore we call on people to join this call for an autonomous plebiscite throughout the territories as an exercise of our own independent power. Until diginity becomes the custom.”
\n
As an anarchist, there are some things I agree with in the communiqué, and some things I don’t, and surely there were even other anarchists who helped shape the communiqué. Overall, though, I wish more of the assemblies were oriented towards things we can do rather than what we think about ongoing issues…because when it comes to ideology, we’ll never all agree. The assembly in my neighborhood involves Trotskyists, anarchists, liberals, and those identities aren’t changing any time soon, and whenever we talk about what needs to happen with the constitutional assembly it’s just a broken record of grand schemes for social change. Instead, I wish we were discussing things like, if martial law is declared again, what will we do? What is our neighborhood’s policy on looting—like, maybe immigrants and mothers get first pick? How do we stop our neighbors from getting evicted? When something big goes down, where will we gather? Orienting the discussions around breaking the law, together, rather than shaping the law. The communiqué about the plebiscite does call for the most important thing, however, which is not giving up the streets in light of the Agreement for Social Peace.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/09/20/9.jpg\")
Graffiti reading “September is black—nothing to celebrate”; “vengeance”; and “freedom to prisoners.”
\nModatima and other organizations are part of the broader social movement “No más zonas de sacrificio” (no more sacrifice zones) against industrial pollution in Chile. They approach environmental justice with a class analysis, recognizing that national economic development relies on extractive industries, foreign investment, and international corporate profits. For example, the plantation lumber industry has done considerable harm to water in many Mapuche communities; some of the most insurgent Mapuche communities happen to be the ones that do not have enough water to meet basic human rights standards. ↩
\nThe NO+AFP (“no more AFP”) movement organizes protests against the Pension Fund Administrators (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, or AFP). ↩
\nInterviewee’s note: We refer to the political caste because it is comprised of groups, the majority of which have developed in the political institutions without considering the real popular base or the world of the workers. Even though new groups have emerged within the political institutions following the initial student movement (such as Frente Amplio, the principle collective coalition of the government), they have adopted the same political marketing strategy: rather than building from and with social bases, offering a publicity product. ↩
\nTo explore the causes and implications of the wave of protests that broke out in Cuba on July 11, we present two interviews with Cuban anarchists and a statement from an anarchist initiative in Cuba.
\n\nWe have heard a wide range of explanations for last week’s protests in Cuba. Right-wing proponents of capitalism blame the Cuban government, charging that the protests stem from the failures of one-party socialism. Self-proclaimed anti-imperialists blame the United States government, alleging that these protests indicate covert US intervention. Others blame US sanctions on Cuba, suggesting that these are chiefly to blame for creating the economic conditions that sparked the protests. Each of these narratives contains a grain of truth, but all fall short of grasping the whole.
\n\nHow do people in Cuba see the protests? If we do not wish to simply project our own assumptions onto the events, the first thing we should do is to ask Cubans how they understand what is happening. Of course, there are bound to be countless different perspectives among the participants in a popular protest movement—but we can begin by consulting those whose politics are similar to our own.
\n\nOne of the more visible Cuban anarchist groups is the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop (Taller Libertario Alfredo López), an anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and anti-capitalist initiative that emerged in 2012. They are part of the Anarchist Federation of the Caribbean and Central America and one of the participants in the ABRA Social Center and Libertarian Library.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/22/7.jpg\")
The ABRA Social Center and Libertarian Library.
\nAt the beginning of January 2021, well before the beginning of the recent protest movement, the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop published a statement spelling out their political positions. They began by expressing their opposition to the trade sanctions imposed by the United States:
\n\n\n\n\n1.) We denounce any embargo on the Cuban people, whether imposed from abroad or from within, by any states, United or otherwise. We radically support the full deployment of our people’s creative capacities—their self-organization, self-subsistence, and self-liberation—in a world that needs more solidarity and cooperation.
\n
Secondly, they expressed doubt that the sudden escalation of social unrest in Cuba would necessarily produce positive results when laborers and poor people lack structures for self-organization:
\n\n\n\n\n2.) We do not support provocations aimed towards a social explosion. This would be tragic in the current circumstances of organizational deterioration of the working classes and the most precarious segments of society.
\n
This position generated controversy—see, for example, this response by exiled Cuban anarchist Gustavo Rodríguez, who explores the reasons that anarchists might support a “social explosion” [explosión social] like the recent uprisings in Chile and Colombia.
\n\nNevertheless, four days ago, the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop published a statement affirming last week’s protests in Cuba. It is significant that an organization that has expressed skepticism about “provocations aimed towards a social explosion” has rejected the narrative that the protests are the result of manipulation:
\n\n\n\n\nTo make geopolitical arguments right now about the place of Cuba in imperial global strategy, to argue that the anti-government protests in Cuba are inevitably paid for by the Cuban right wing in Miami, that the protesters are simple criminals looking to loot, that the true revolutionaries are with the government—these are all arguments that describe a significant part of reality, but they miss it on one point. The people of Cuba have just as much right to protest as those of Colombia and Chile. What’s the difference? That they are oligarchies with different origins? With more or less brutal practices? More or less distinguishable camouflage? More or less servile postures towards the US government? More or less sublime ideas to justify their privileges?
\n
The point here is simple, but it is essential. Poor people in Cuba, like poor people everywhere, have the right to stand up for themselves. Who could know better than they do when it is necessary for them to act?
\n\n“If you protest, an even worse government will come to power.” This is a pretext that any government can employ to justify suppressing opposition—and practically every government has. If we legitimize this excuse, we are siding with a section of the ruling class against ordinary people like ourselves, denying that they know what is best for themselves. If we refuse to extend solidarity to the exploited and oppressed, they will inevitably gravitate to the right—as they have across the former Eastern Bloc. To abandon rank-and-file protesters in places like Cuba is to give the far right a golden recruiting opportunity.
\n\nWe should understand what is happening in Cuba in a global context. People are not simply protesting in one nation. People have been protesting in France, in Hong Kong, in Catalunya, in Lebanon, in Ecuador, in Chile, in the United States, in Belarus, in Russia, in Tunisia, in Brazil, in Colombia. Countless people in dramatically different geopolitical contexts, under dramatically different regimes, have been adopting similar tactics to express similar grievances. This suggests that what is going on here is deeper than the failures of the Cuban government or the manipulations of the US government.
\n\nThough the protests in Cuba were triggered by specific economic developments, we can identify a few common threads that connect practically all of the aforementioned examples. First, everywhere across the board, we see increasing wealth disparities and austerity measures—from the barefaced capitalism of the United States to the social-democratic countries of northern Europe to authoritarian socialist countries like China and Nicaragua. Second, at the same time that they are cutting social programs and protections, all of these governments are investing considerable resources in intensifying state violence and surveillance. Consequently, practically all of them are facing crises of legitimacy, whether those take the form of national independence struggles, populist movements, demands for “more democracy,” or bona fide horizontal social movements.
\n\nBoth austerity measures and intensified policing disproportionately impact the most oppressed and impoverished demographics in each country—from Black communities in the United States to southeast Asian guest workers in the Middle East—while galvanizing reactionaries who are anxious about losing their privileges. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this situation, dramatizing the gulfs between wealthy and poor, ruler and ruled.
\n\nSo what is happening in Cuba is not unique—and it is not just the result of government misconduct or intervention.1 When we see things this way, our responsibilities become clear.
\n\nIt is not within the power of anarchists to prop up authoritarian regimes from the 20th century, nor should we seek to. To tie our hopes to the receding prospects of a state project, associating our aspirations for liberation with its shortfalls, will only discredit us, the same way that the collapse of the USSR discredited socialism in Russia and the failures of Syriza paved the way for the far-right New Democracy party in Greece. We have to build a new generation of movements based in contemporary grassroots struggles, in order to grapple with the problems that capitalism poses on a global scale. Our responsibility is to the ordinary people in Cuba, not to those who rule them. We should make contact with those who are experimenting with principled forms of self-defense and self-determination in order to act in solidarity with them—under the regimes that prevail today and under whatever regimes may succeed those tomorrow.
\n\nIn that spirit, we invite you to read the following interview with Cuban anarchists about the events of the past week. You can also read the statement from the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop, “Cuba: The End of the Social Spell of the ‘Revolution,’” in full at the conclusion of the interview.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/22/1.jpg\")
Every pundit brings their prefabricated ideas to discussions about Cuba.
\nWe interviewed two Cuban anarchists. One is involved with the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop in Havana. The other is involved in projects outside Havana, elsewhere on the island; anarchists from the United States met her and her comrades in early 2019. Both remain anonymous for their safety. In translating these interviews from the original Spanish, we edited for length and clarity.
\n\nHow would you like to identify yourself and how you are situated in Cuban society?
\n\nAnarchist from outside Havana (hereafter, AOH): I am a working woman. I belong to two organizations, a workers’ union and an association of creative youth.
\n\nAnarchist from the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop (hereafter, ALLW): I’m an anarchist and I work with the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop. I am also a student at the University of Havana and I participate in several different projects and types of activism.
\n\nAs an anarchist, what have you been able to do there?
\n\nAOH: The anarchists here are small subcultures that are united. Everyone gets along and helps each other. As an anarchist, you can do a lot—whatever is necessary for the well-being of people in general.
\n\nALLW: I’ve mainly been involved in helping free the university students arrested during and after July 11. We were able to put together a group of students and alumni that sent a letter of complaint to the Ministry of Higher Education and put pressure on them to free those arrested as soon as possible. We haven’t been spared harassment and intimidation in this process, since in Cuba university reform ended up being taken over by the state, which dominates the university administration and student organization (the Federation of University Students, Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios, FEU) together with the Communist Party. In intimidating students out of organizing, the state has employed the same pretext used to discredit the protests: that we are confused.”
\n\nApart from my role in university circles, I’ve also done what I can to support the gestures of solidarity that have been taking place since before the protests to confront the health crisis gripping the country. These days, it’s one of the most relevant self-organized processes in Cuba, and our collective agrees that it’s important to participate in. Connecting this with other current movements will also be an important step towards overcoming conditional solidarity that ends up disappearing or being swallowed up by the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/22/4.jpg\")
An anarchist-organized guerrilla garden—part of the new phenomenon of environmentalism in Cuba, which carries an anti-authoritarian current within it. This garden was established on what used to be a neighborhood trash heap.
\nHow did the protests begin?
\n\nAOH: The hospitals are in bad shape; there isn’t enough medication and equipment for the doctors to do their jobs and, sadly, people are dying. If you can find groceries, they’re priced way too high to afford. It’s known that the US blockade exists and that this means that other countries can’t trade with Cuba, and that’s why things are scarce. In these conditions, it is necessary to accept any humanitarian aid for the good of the people. There was an aid shipment that wasn’t accepted. [More information here.]
\n\nThe protests began due to the failure of the hospitals in Matanzas and the lack of medication. Through social media, reports began to give spiritual strength to the province. Other provinces had the same problems, just less severe, and would soon find themselves in the same situation. It was an impulse, from this situation and others, that provoked an explosion from people, not simply on social media but out in the street.
\n\nThey were cutting off the electricity for six hours a day because a thermoelectric plant was having problems. On Sunday, July 11, through social media like Facebook, you could see the people who decided to take to the streets in the provinces calling out to the world for humanitarian aid to help with the situation on the island.
\n\nThe thermoelectric plant was fixed that same day so that all Cubans could have electricity in their houses.
\n\nALLW: The protests began outside of Havana, in areas scourged by the supply shortage, excessive quarantines, and blackouts lasting up to 12 hours. Added to the accumulated social discontent from the present crisis produced by the intensification of the US embargo and government mismanagement—the peak of which was the implementation of a series of measures at the beginning of the year that led to increased inflation and the growth of the black market—this meant that in a municipality like San Antonio, hundreds of people poured into the streets to express their discontent. After the impact of that demonstration on social media, other protests occurred in areas suffering similar problems. Around 4 pm, the demonstrations spread nationally.
\n\nWhat forms of organization and protest have you seen in and out of the streets?
\n\nALLW: The protest in San Antonio was very heterogeneous. As I understand it, one group started a caravan that passed through other towns while another group stayed in place, at one point coinciding with the Cuban president who was making his way there. They had a similar character in the rest of the country; reports say that up until 4 pm, all were peaceful. It was after Díaz-Canel’s communiqué, in which he called for his “revolutionaries” to confront the demonstrators, that harsh repression took place against peaceful marches, along with fierce clashes with the police. (The capital city had already felt the hand of the police around the Capitol building, the seat of the National Assembly, shortly before this).
\n\nBeyond this, there wasn’t much organization. All of the marches were spontaneous and ended up disoriented and easily dispersed. The Internet shutdown also reduced their visibility, while an immediate flood of (dis)information from the state proclaimed that the protests had ended in many places. Communication suffered a big hit during this whole process, since the only things getting through were the skewed news of the official media and lots of fake news spread through messaging apps. This contributed significantly to the reduction of tensions, but the return of the Internet and the publication of testimonials about repression haven’t permitted a complete return to normality. These days, the major organizing spaces are focused on the struggle to free those arrested—more than 500 people, according to some lists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/22/5.jpg\")
An anarchist infoshop in Cuba.
\nWhat is your analysis of the protest movement? What social and political tendencies are involved in it? How much of the population supports it?
\n\nAOH: There are several different generations in Cuba, including those who lived through the period of capitalism, suffered the consequences of [Fulgencio] Batista’s administration, and helped make the revolution so that we could have free healthcare and education. Thanks to this, they learned to read and write. That portion of the population supports [the government].
\n\nThen there’s the younger generation, those who have internet and value “living decently”—we’re not talking about luxuries, just the desire that with a job you could have adequate nutrition, because at the Cuban table it’s difficult to get breakfast with milk, lunch with an egg, and, let’s say, dinner with a small piece of meat or vegetables. This generation is accustomed to salaries that barely pay enough for a week’s expenses. They raised the salaries recently, but with the scarcity, the price of everything has shot up and basic necessities are impossible to afford. The only place you can get groceries or cleaning products, home appliances, and the like is in stores that only accept cards with dollars on them, which have to be sent from other countries because Cuba doesn’t sell them.
\n\nALLW: The demonstrations were a social explosion, without a doubt. The crisis and the tensions generated by precarity and the collapse of the health system brought it about. Now, it wasn’t a generalized explosion across all social strata. Beyond the areas where significant portions of the towns were involved, the poorest sectors of the population carried out the majority of the protests. The classist bias with which the state and its defenders have approached the issue is evident in the criticism of the protesters and their violence. Social inequality has been growing in Cuba for decades now, and the state has played with this dynamic to make alliances and secure loyalties. In this case, there’s been a clash between the most disadvantaged and most privileged sectors. This conflict has been reflected even in the discourse of the segments of the left that are most loyal to the state. The demonstrations have been made to look like criminal actions (orchestrated from the United States), ignoring the classist foundation here.
\n\nIt would be difficult to define a political tendency in the demonstrations (beyond the liberal slogans). The people went out to put an end to their precarious situation—that was really their hope, with no compass beyond the street as a space to amplify their demands.
\n\nIn terms of support for the protests, I wouldn’t venture to guess a percentage. But definitely since July 11, people won’t stop talking about what happened…
\n\nHow much of the population supports the government against the protests? What social and political tendencies are involved in supporting the state?
\n\nALLW: There’s definitely a large portion that supports the government. This sector is mainly made up of people who are less poor and are privileged by their integration into the system. These were the “revolutionaries” called on by Díaz-Canel on July 11.
\n\nThe old ideological apparatus of the Party is evident in support for the government. This isn’t necessarily integrated into the real, hidden power behind the state, headed by Arturo López-Callejas, a military officer and the president of GAESA [Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA, the Cuban business conglomerate owned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces], which is the largest economic conglomerate in the country. It is the leftist circles that for years have tried to climb the ladders of power with a lukewarm critique of bureaucracy and a fierce critique of dissidents, and a great part of the Latin American and international left that has sided with the false anti-imperialist discourse of the state. All of this being broadcast on official media—which are more available now due to the lack of Internet—has perhaps tilted things slightly towards the side of the state. But to reiterate, it’s difficult in this moment to assume a balance of power. In truth, given the objective situation of the country, another rupture could occur sooner rather than later, and these months or weeks will better define the character it takes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/22/6.jpg\")
History stands still for no one—but we can choose to keep up with it if we wish.
\nHow seriously do you take the accusation that the protests are coordinated by forces associated with the United States government? Who do you think stands to benefit most from the protests?
\n\nAOH: I don’t think that the protests are associated with the US government. No one who took to the streets was paid by any institution; they went out to ask for help. Many aren’t criminals or marginalized people; they are workers and students.
\n\nI disagree with the attitude of the police. They can’t just mistreat someone because of a difference of opinion. There must be freedom of expression and there must not be a military intervention: that is war. I also disagree with the president, who called for combat, because there must not be a civil war.
\n\n[In the past], groups from other countries have tried to topple the government by paying people in Cuba. But what’s happening now isn’t like that. It was an impulse towards rapid support for the common good in this country.
\n\nALLW: North American interference is already an old story here. Long before the victory of the Revolution, the importance that the United States placed on Cuba was well known. Since the 1990s, especially, they have developed a subversive plan that had already been used in other parts of the world. The implementation of this plan has increased in the last few years, but it has failed repeatedly and stimulated a national debate on the political future of the country. To say now that this policy of the United States towards Cuba produced the social explosion is to disregard the fact that the reasons for which people took to the streets have more to do with the bureaucracy’s horrible mismanagement of the crisis and the tremendous increase in precarity that its policies have provoked. The people have also seen the broad incoherence between what is said in the official media and what happens in reality, and this has also helped discredit the state.
\n\nFor the people, the interventionist policy of the United States has been nothing more than the irritating noise of a mosquito in their ears, in comparison to the constant hammering of the state’s nonsense.
\n\nOf course, as anarchists, we reject such an imperialist policy towards our country, but it’s not where we place responsibility for the national situation.
\n\nMany are describing these protests as the largest anti-government mobilizations in 30 years. Do these protests seem to follow in a similar thread, or are they different?
\n\nALLW: This explosion has definitely been historic. I don’t know of anything on par since 1959. The difference is marked by several elements: first, the repeat of a situation like the 1990s crisis, but without the hegemony embodied by a personality like Fidel Castro or the same capacities for solidarity as years ago, now all spent by the state’s cooptation of multiple initiatives. Second, a national reality made more visible by the Internet helped the news of successive protests to overcome the fear that had penetrated the demonstrations. The third element is the erosion of the social pact and the project of the “Revolution,” which was unprecedented until now.
\n\nAny concluding thoughts?
\n\nAOH: To conclude… to use an expression and laugh one more time: We Cubans are like the dolphin: “Up to the neck in water and always laughing.”
\n\nA laughter that has been fading away from the dolphins’ faces in a sea turned to gray, without the blue-green of hope.
\n\nA song that I wrote:
\n\n“MIEDO”
Desde que nací,
\nEstoy escuchando algo,
\nAlgo que susurra y nadie hablando,
\nShhh las paredes tienen oidos
\nShhh las paredes tienen oidos,
Miedo en la escuela,
\nMiedo en la casa,
\nMiedo en la calle
\nMiedo en el aire,
Yo quiero gritar
\nQuiero respirar
\nPero es imposible volver a soñar
\nEs un miedo que asfixia
\nEs un control social
\nDisturbio cerebral
\nShhh las paredes tienen oidos
\nShhh las paredes tienen oidos
\nOyeeé no te calles
\nOyeee no te calles
\nYo quiero gritar.…
Ever since I was born,
\nI’ve been listening to something,
\nSomething that whispers and no one is talking,
\nShhh the walls have ears
\nShhh the walls have ears,
Fear in the school,
\nFear in the house,
\nFear in the street
\nFear in the air,
I want to shout
\nI want to breathe
\nBut it’s impossible to dream again
\nIt’s a fear that suffocates you
\nIt’s social control
\nA riot in the brain
\nShhh the walls have ears
\nShhh the walls have ears
\nHeyyy don’t shut up
\nHeyyy don’t shut up
\nI want to shout………
Any band that wants to play this, do it, and each time you play it, say it’s for Cuba.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/22/3.jpg\")
The following text was published four days ago by the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop.
\n\nThe repressive social spell that kept a large portion of the dinosaurs of the international left pacified has vanished. Underneath the “Cuban Revolution,” and counter to its benign image, the “Cuban state” has emerged publicly, in all its repressive rawness and grandiloquence. The same Cuban state that, to confront Yankee imperialism, created an omnipresent political police force to combat the society under its control. The same Cuban state that, in the name of socialism, destroyed all the working-class organizations that, with their histories of struggle, would have made socialism’s declared victories into an everyday reality. That same Cuban state that has turned solidarity into an international brand identity while keeping us submerged in distrust and fear between neighbors. The same Cuban state that—in the middle of the intensified Yankee embargo—builds more hotels for foreign tourists than infrastructure to produce food, fruit, and milk. The same Cuban state that has produced the only vaccines against COVID-19 in Latin America, but makes its health personnel function essentially as unpaid members of the political police.
\n\nIn the recent days of July 2021, that Cuban state has shown what it really is: an oligarchy like any other, zealously maintaining its absolute power at any cost; a vulgar kleptocracy putting on enlightened, humanist airs; a pyramid of power as solid and out of proportion as the pyramids of the Egyptian theocracies, but surrounded by paradisaical beaches.
\n\nTo make geopolitical arguments right now about the place of Cuba in imperial global strategy, to argue that the anti-government protests in Cuba are inevitably paid for by the Cuban right wing in Miami, that the protesters are simple criminals looking to loot, that the true revolutionaries are with the government—these are all arguments that describe a significant part of reality, but they miss it on one point. The people of Cuba have just as much right to protest as those of Colombia and Chile. What’s the difference? That they are oligarchies with different origins? With more or less brutal practices? More or less distinguishable camouflage? More or less servile postures towards the US government? More or less sublime ideas to justify their privileges? All of these immense differences among the Colombian, Chilean, and Cuban oligarchies are reduced to zero when on a beautiful Sunday morning you discover that, in addition to the mafioso oligarchies in Colombia and Chile, the Cuban oligarchy is also—before an unarmed populace—armed to the teeth. A little more or a little less, to crush you and your brothers, your body and your mind, if it merely occurs to you to question the normality that they manage.
\n\nEverything the Cuban state has done to produce domestic vaccines against COVID-19, all the labor subsidies, all the wage increases it offered to many sectors in the middle of the pandemic—all of a sudden, these all evaporate, not just because of the inflationary spiral and endemic food shortage in Cuba, but also because it’s been made clear that it all formed part of the macabre framework of “repressive tolerance.” This is something that any decent person in Cuba can now discover, without needing to read any brilliant books on counterculture. We can serenely define those who would come now to sweeten that repressive tolerance in this country, and to raise the mirage of militarized harmony over it, as the new face of that which has no place in our future. Those who, in the name of a future democracy or the smooth functioning of the economy, come to discredit the affinities, fellowship, and energy that blossomed in the protests, or to reduce what happened on those days to “simple vandalism by social degenerates,” speak in the name and language of the decrepit oligarchies that once again shamelessly raise their voices in this country.
\n\nThe “masses” have once again become the “people,” with all of their light and shadows, by refusing to obey the heavy chains of control and instead trusting in affection, affinity, and the minimum capacities to think and act together that have reemerged in acts of disobedience and solidarity among equals, in the middle of the spiral of violence, the pandemic, and the supply shortage. This is the new reality that was born in Cuba during these days of July 2021, and it is this new reality, as anarchists in Cuba, of which we want to be a part.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/07/22/2.jpg\")
\nBoth neoliberal capitalism and the socialist administrations that answer to it leave all of us increasingly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of markets and global supply chains. In an agriculturally productive country like Cuba, a lack of affordable food is an absurdity produced by capitalism, mediated through a socialist government that has prioritized integration into the global economy over sustainable food production. ↩
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