![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/3.jpg\")
A demonstration at the Port of Tacoma in Washington on November 6, 2023.
\nHappy new year! Congratulations on surviving. Let’s take stock of where we are.
\n\nIn our 2022 year in review report, we documented the ebb phase of social movements that followed the upheavals of 2019 and 2020, as the strategies that had previously been successful produced diminishing returns and the authorities learned from their defeats. It remains a defining feature of our era that even the fiercest struggles have largely failed to achieve their intermediate demands. Apparently, those who administer the increasingly fragile social order some call late capitalism are not in a position to give ground. Rather than offering concessions to the desperate and unruly, governments across the political spectrum are investing in repressive technologies and doubling down on their dependence on the police.
\n\nOverseas, the consequences of this were already clear a year ago:
\n\n\n\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world.
\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors.
\n
Unfortunately, the events of 2023 have borne out our fears. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given way to a grinding war of attrition, civil war broke out in Sudan, Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, and now the Israeli government is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. These are not aberrations, but glimpses of the future if we do not manage to change course.
\n\nThis shows what is at stake in our awkward efforts to change the world. In these circumstances, if it is not possible to win intermediate demands, it may be easier to pursue revolutionary transformation outright.
\n\nFortunately, we are not the only ones concerned with these questions. This year, we have been inspired by the tenacity of participants in ongoing struggles such as the fight to stop Cop City—by the empathy that has moved people around the world to act in solidarity with the residents of Gaza—by the bravery of rebels from Ecuador to France. Our experiences coming together in demonstrations, mutual aid projects, concerts, book fairs, and passionate discussions have sustained our faith in the potential of humanity. This story is far from over.
\n\n2024 will probably be a roller coaster ride. In the United States, the election season is shaping up to be chaotic indeed, and that will spill over into social conflict on the streets. It’s up to us to show that, rather than choosing between fascists and centrists determined to preserve a self-destructing system, people can come together in networks based in solidarity, mutual aid, and a more ambitious vision of what our lives could be.
\n\nThis is the best way to prepare for whatever is ahead.
\n\nHere, we’ll review our own efforts over the past year—the coverage we have provided from within social movements and the projects we have contributed.
\n\nOn October 7, militants from Hamas and other Palestinian groups breached the Gaza border fence and carried out a series of attacks, killing 1139 people. The Israeli government seized the opportunity to pursue ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. They had massacred well over 21,000 Palestinians by the end of 2023, two thirds of whom were women and children.
\n\nIn response, the United States has seen a surge of protest and direct action. At the beginning of November, we published a text from the Fayer collective, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, explaining why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what they believe it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military. Over the following weeks, we published reports from anarchists who participated in blockading the Port of Tacoma, a Raytheon facility, and various Amazon locations in order to interrupt the flow of weapons and money to the Israeli military.
\n\nAs we enter 2024, stopping the ethnic cleansing in Gaza remains one of the most urgent challenges before us.
\n\n A demonstration at the Port of Tacoma in Washington on November 6, 2023.
\nOver the past two years, the movement to stop Cop City and defend Weelaunee Forest has become one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Utilizing a variety of strategies, opponents of the proposed police militarization facility have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction. In retaliation, the authorities have set new precedents in repression, murdering one forest defender and pressing outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective. The first of those defendants is scheduled to stand trial beginning in early January 2024.
\n\nWe have published an array of perspectives from various participants in the movement, including material about the values that inspire them to keep fighting. In the latest installment of our comprehensive history of the movement, we trace its trajectory across the second half of 2023, exploring how the movement has sought to maintain a participatory and confrontational character even under tremendous pressure.
\n\nWe understand the fight against Cop City as a bridge between the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the movements of the future. In seeking to overcome the limits that the uprising of 2020 reached, the participants have set an example that will be of use next time large numbers of people are catalyzed into action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/14.jpg\")
The Cop City construction site on March 5, 2023.
\nIn January, we published a photoessay documenting the showdown between thousands of police and protesters in Lützerath, where the German government set out to evict an ecological encampment.
\n\nIn February, we published an article about the imprisoned Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito. By then, he had been on hunger strike for over 100 days, demanding to be released from solitary confinement. We argued that Alfredo’s strike was a warning—a message about the conditions being prepared for all of us in a society that increasingly treats human life as cheap.
\n\nIn March, we covered the movement in France against the pension reform as it escalated into a major conflict. In June, the streets of France exploded once more after the police murdered 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. Unfortunately, as one of our contributors observed afterwards, over the past few years, different segments of the population of France have revolted successively, rather than all at once, enabling the authorities to weather the storm.
\n\nFurther east, we covered the mutiny of the Wagner private military company against the government of Vladimir Putin from the perspective of Russian anarchists. As we see it, such internal conflicts are the inevitable consequence of the militarization of society and the increasing centrality of armed force in the pursuit of state policy. In Russia, as in Sudan, the government armed mercenaries to do their dirty work, setting the stage for an armed conflict. In Sudan, the resulting civil war has been catastrophic for civilians.
\n\nElsewhere, we reported an inspiring story about solidarity between refugees and exiles, in which Russian anarchists living in exile in Armenia sought to support Armenian squatters. When Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, we published the perspectives of Armenian anarchists on the events.
\n\nFinally, we explored how the Greek government’s decision to evict the self-organized refugee camp at Lavrio represents the intersection of the Turkish government’s war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/4.jpg\")
What goes up most come down. France in spring 2023.
\nIn honor of March 8, International Women’s Day, we published an account of the genealogy of the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) showing how it spread from the part of Kurdistan that is ruled by the Turkish government to Iran and elsewhere around the world. Shortly afterwards, in response to the earthquake that wracked Syria and Turkey in February, we published statements from supporters of liberation movements in those regions showing how the Turkish and Syrian governments not only failed to protect their subjects but took advantage of the catastrophe to blockade and even bomb them.
\n\nLater that month, we published a report from an Israeli anarchist exploring how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate power and the protest movement that emerged in response to it represented a conflict between competing elites and their respective colonial models, neither of which offered any real proposal to address the oppression and displacement of Palestinians. In October, the day after the October 7 attacks, we published a widely read interview with another Israeli anarchist, Jonathan Pollak, discussing the escalation of violence in Palestine and the repression the Israeli government metes out to those who act in solidarity with Palestinians.
\n\nWe followed that up with a perspective from a Palestinian in the part of Palestine occupied in 1948, describing life under colonial rule and emphasizing the importance of grassroots organizing and solidarity in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
\n\nIn Brazil, 2023 began with a clumsy repeat performance of the incident on January 6, 2021 when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in hopes of keeping him in office. At the same time, in Peru, a tumultuous protest movement culminated in a march on the capital city of Lima. We spoke with Peruvian anarchists to get insight into those events.
\n\nThe year ended with Javier Milei taking power in Argentina. We conducted an interview with anarchists from Rosario in order to understand the decades of social struggle and economic restructuring that created the conditions in which Javier Milei came to power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/11/26/9.jpg\")
Barricades surround the presidential palace on December 20, 2001 immediately before President Fernando De la Rua fled from the rooftop in a helicopter. The last time a government tried to impose unbridled capitalism on the population of Argentina, it ended like this.
\nOur history publishing this year focused mostly on the early 21st century. We chronicled how anti-fascists won the “battle of York” in Pennsylvania in 2002, comparing that pitched struggle with the much grimmer situation two decades later. We explored the history of the queer anarchist organizing umbrella Bash Back! ahead of a new Bash Back! convergence. Finally, to offer a historical reference point to those seeking to take action against arms traffickers today, we revisited the Smash EDO campaign in Britain a decade ago.
\n\nThis coming year, we hope to publish more work about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
\n\nThe vantage point of a police officer in Sainte-Soline in spring 2023.
\nIn January, police murdered Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita to their fellow forest defenders. Tortuguita had been occupying Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta for months, and bravely chose to reoccupy it after a police raid the previous December. The thousands of people who have participated in the movement to Stop Cop City have kept Tortuguita’s memory alive in defiance of the forces of repression and erasure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/1.jpg\")
Manuel Terán, known as Tortuguita.
\nIn February, our longtime friend Jen Angel was killed in Oakland, California. Jen spent her life building infrastructure for anarchist organizing, publishing, and relationships.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/2.jpg\")
Jen Angel.
\nOn April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov. We published a biography of Dmitry. Over the course of a decade and a half, he had participated in revolutionary struggle in Russia, Belarus, Rojava, and Ukraine against a backdrop of intensifying tyranny. The story of his life offers insight into the recent history of the former Soviet Union. It is also an inspiring example of all the things an anarchist can accomplish, even in adverse conditions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/6.jpg\")
Dmitry Petrov.
\nActive Distribution has published a small book collecting our biography alongside some of his writings and those of his comrades. PM Press is distributing these books in the United States now.
\n\nOn December 6,1 anarchist insurrectionist and author Alfredo Bonanno passed away. Bonanno proposed the refusal of work and the pursuit of joyous revolt as revolutionary measures in the struggle against all forms of domination and despair; his ideas played an influential role in the development of our own collective projects. We prepared a short history of his life.
\n\nFinally, we want to give thanks for those we feared we might lose in 2023 who are still with us today. It was easy to imagine that Alfredo Cospito might not survive his hunger strike, but he did. Likewise, a participant in the confrontational demonstration in Sainte-Soline, France remained in a coma for many days because a police officer had attempted to kill him by firing a grenade at his head. Thankfully, Serge recovered.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/5.jpg\")
“Tortuguita lives; the struggle continues.” A banner displayed at a memorial march in January 2023 during which a police car caught fire.
\nIn 2023, we participated in book fairs and presentations in the United States from Boston and New York to Sacramento and Oakland, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, and elsewhere.
\n\nOne of the most exciting events of the year was the worldwide anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. This festival celebrated the 151-year anniversary of the founding congress of the federation known as the Anti-Authoritarian International—the continuation of the International Workingmen’s [sic] Association, one of the most important European labor organizations of the 19th century. Drawing a reputed 5000 people—mostly from central Europe, but also from as far away as Chile and Australia—the gathering in Saint-Imier may have been the largest exclusively anarchist event of the year.
\n\nWith the assistance of participants from Germany, Russia, Belarus, Finland, the United States, and elsewhere around the world, we published a thorough report on the gathering, and followed it up with a memoir reflecting specifically on dynamics and discourse around gender and sexuality at the gathering.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/11.jpg\")
A sticker seen during the gathering in Saint-Imier.
\nThis year, to celebrate the umpteenth reprinting of our classic gender poster, we released a 2023 remix of that poster addressing the current threats to gender self-determination and the countervailing forms of solidarity and collective self-defense. Alongside those, we published a discussion of the ways that the battle lines in discourse about gender have shifted over the two decades since we debuted the original. It’s one of the more thoughtful and reflective texts we have completed this year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/13.jpg\")
Our new “gender remix” poster in action.
\nIn addition to those, we prepared posters in solidarity with Palestinians and with those who seek to defend the forest in Atlanta and elsewhere around the world. All of these are available to download, print out, and paste up on the walls of your community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/10.jpg\")
Another of our posters in the wild.
\nThis year, we released fully five zines about the movement to Stop Cop City, covering the history of the movement in detail, the various strategies that participants have employed, the RICO charges, and more. These have been distributed in Atlanta and at support events all around the United States.
\n\nWe also published zines offering a perspective from Palestine, discussing the fight for gender self-determination, describing how to survive a felony trial, and recounting the lessons of the “green scare,” the federal operation targeting ecological activists.
\n\nTo make printing easier, we introduced a new “ink lite” option for printing our zines when you are short on toner.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/12.jpg\")
A street in Atlanta following a clash between police and Stop Cop City demonstrators in November 2023.
\nAfter a lull in our audio efforts, we pulled together a new team to prepare audio versions of our articles. This year, we released 20 such “audio zines,” including five about efforts towards Palestinian solidarity and five about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.
\n\nYou can listen to all of them here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/8.jpg\")
\nOver the course of 2023, we published dozens of articles in Spanish; over a dozen in French, Italian, and Polish; and several articles each in Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. We also added texts in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Kurdish. We’ve published posters and zines in many of those languages, as well. You can find a comprehensive guide to our non-English content here.
\n\nWe’ve recently added a Turkish version of our introduction to anarchism, To Change Everything. It’s now available in a total of 34 languages.
\n\nWe are grateful to all the translators around the world who have worked with us to help us make our work accessible to more people. If you can help us translate anything we have published into any language, please contact us!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/9.jpg\")
Police and protesters face off in Lützerath, Germany in January 2023.
\nIn honor of the life of Alfredo Bonanno, we made a short film dramatizing the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.
\n\nWe also published a short video to celebrate Steal Something from Work Day, drawing on the work of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev.
\n\nFinally, we invite you to participate in a holiday tradition by watching the 2023 edition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
\n\nIt’s the most wonderful time of the year, 2023 edition.
\nThat hardly scratches the surface of everything we’ve accomplished this year—the adventures we’ve embarked on, the relationships we’ve nourished, the art forms we’ve shared. The most exciting parts rarely enter the public record!
\n\nAs always, all of our efforts are copyright free, produced and distributed by volunteer labor. We’re not trying to concentrate power in our own hands, but to establish reproducible models and put resources at the disposal of horizontal movements. This explains why we rarely pester you with fundraising requests. If you wish to support us financially, you can do so here—but the very best thing you could do for us is to undertake your own projects in the same spirit, or participate in our efforts.
\n\nThank you for sticking with us through another year. We look forward to what is ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/12/29/7.jpg\")
\nDecember 6 happened to be the anniversary of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, which set off the Greek uprising of 2008. The way that the uprising in Greece unfolded arguably vindicates some of Bonanno’s arguments in favor of confrontational organizing and autonomous structures. ↩
\nWe’ve survived 2022—and with it, the ebb tide following the upheavals of 2019 and 2020. Both in the United States and around the world, this has been a year of challenges and reversals. In the following overview, we revisit how we got here, explore the events of the past twelve months, and review our own efforts to contribute to movements for liberation.
\n\nAs for our collective, we reach the end of 2022 embattled but unbowed. We began the year with our warehouse in ashes and concluded it by getting permanently suspended from Twitter by Elon Musk—at that time the world’s richest man—at the request of a notorious pro-fascist troll. Yet in response to the fire, our comrades raised tens of thousands of dollars to support us and we were able to go right back into action; likewise, thus far, our suspension from the chief corporate social media platforms has only multiplied the number of people visiting our website and ordering our materials.
\n\nWe didn’t expect this to be easy. We go into 2023 ready for the next round and we hope you’ll be right there beside us.
\n\nIn the United States, the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 and the subsequent far-right counter-mobilization remain the most significant political events of our time. The events of 2021 and 2022 have played out in their shadow. To understand the developments of the past year, we must begin in 2020.
\n\nAs we argued in our retrospective on the fiasco of January 6, 2021,
\n\n\n\n\nWhen police murdered George Floyd, public trust and respect for law enforcement plummeted to unprecedented depths. Demands to defund or even abolish the police migrated from the extreme political margins to become serious proposals that were widely debated in the mainstream. Fox News and its imitators continued their racially charged crime alarmism, but with diminishing returns; efforts by police unions, PR firms, and liberal corporate media outlets to feature stories of cops doing good made little headway against the widespread suspicion that had taken hold from the left all the way to the center.
\n\nIn this environment, the failed coup of January 6 was a godsend to the state. Police could pose as both victims and heroes again, the National Guard as saviors and bulwarks against chaos; even the Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing its part to protect democracy from right-wing thugs. Liberals and mainstream media outlets seized upon these interpretations and ran with them, with extraordinary success.
\n
When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he didn’t have a solid enough grip on power to crack down on the networks that made the uprising of 2020 possible, nor on Donald Trump himself. Instead, Biden, the New York Times, and other centrists joined the right wing in calling for more police and re-legitimizing the judicial system. They succeeded in reconstructing a social consensus—or at least the appearance of one—around support for the coercive institutions of the state.
\n\nAnarchists and other rebels were already exhausted before Biden came into office—witness the attrition in attendance at demonstrations in the waning months of 2020. (Ahead of January 6, 2021, Trump tried to arrange for the National Guard to keep anti-fascists from interfering with the march on the Capitol, apparently regarding them as the chief threat to his coup attempt—but by that time, the anti-fascist movement was so overextended that very few anti-fascists went to Washington, DC at all.) The massive mutual aid projects that had emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the routines of confrontation dating from spring 2020 had largely collapsed by mid-2021. But the same thing happened to the far right: after January 6, 2021, it took them a long time to regain their footing.
\n\nThe centrist grip on power remained tenuous until the 2022 elections. Democrats were convinced that, if previous precedents were any indication, they would be trounced by Republicans—that the polls were not capturing the strength of Trump’s continuing popularity and they were essentially in an interregnum between fascisms. Perhaps as a consequence, throughout 2022, the Biden administration did little to crack down on Trump himself, instead continuing the spectacle of investigation that has been running since at least 2017—which chiefly functions to help both parties solicit donations.
\n\nIn fact, Democrats outperformed their expectations in the elections of November 2022. This may embolden them to crack down on social movements, but it probably won’t shift their approach to Trump. If he remains weak, they won’t want to prevent him from becoming the Republican frontrunner in 2024, and if he regains his political footing, they will be back in the situation they were before, in which they are powerless to do anything besides wring their hands about his bad behavior.
\n\nThe outcome of this election bears further comment. In fall 2020, the New York Times and other centrists had spread fear that street protests would cost Biden the election, attempting to overwrite the popular memory of the George Floyd uprising with their own defeatist narrative. Yet when the votes had been counted and New York Times correspondents crunched the numbers in a report that was not widely circulated, they had to admit that the majority of those who cited the protests as a factor in their decision had voted for Biden. In other words, if anything, the demonstrations in response to the murder of George Floyd helped keep Republicans out of power. If not for the burning of the Third Precinct, most people would never have heard George Floyd’s name—nor been prepared to respond to a potential Trump coup—nor participated in a movement that shifted public discourse. Let no one say that confrontational anti-authoritarian movements inescapably drive people to support the right wing; in a polarized and deadlocked society, the opposite is probably true.
\n\nThis suggests that the suppression of the social movements of 2020 will not ultimately benefit the institutional left or political centrists. While Trump’s star is passing, sooner or later a more centrist Republican Party will probably take the seat of state power that the Democrats have effectively prepared for it by re-legitimizing the police, crushing rebellion, and framing Trump as exceptional.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/3.jpg\")
The George Floyd rebellion of 2020 continued to produce echoes around the world well into 2022.
\nIn short, at the end of 2022, we are finishing up the classic ebb phase that always follows a high point of struggle. This is to be expected. Once people have seen their long-cherished fantasies play out beyond their wildest dreams, discovering in the process what the limitations and shortfalls of those fantasies were, it takes a while to develop and pursue new visions. At the same time, the authorities have learned from the last round of revolt and are putting the pieces in place, one after another, to prevent history from repeating itself.
\n\nStill, the events of 2022 have continued to erode faith in the authorities and the state, especially among young people. At this point, a large proportion of both Democrats and Republicans are chiefly voting out of fear rather than hope. Most of the widely discussed “political issues” of 2022 have been framed as matters that only the state can address: gun control, inflation, student debt, abortion, what instructors can teach in schools, and the like. This is calculated to sideline ordinary people. But as soon as grassroots movements can show that ordinary people can address their needs directly without recourse to representatives, there will be another wave of social movements.
\n\nThe post-2020 lull has been exacerbated by the fact that social atomization and the digital erosion of our attention spans have rendered it difficult to retain any gains from 2020, in terms of both organization and collective memory. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is another step towards the ruling class consolidating control of digital communications, which will create new challenges for future movements. Our species is in a race against time as capitalists implement new repressive technologies and clamp down on the possibilities that digital connectivity opened up.
\n\nMusk’s buyout of Twitter shows how far the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires has gone: they can now buy major infrastructure themselves as private individuals, rather than as corporations. This extreme accumulation of power is contributing to the shift towards authoritarianism across the board—as people have less and less power relative to those who claim to represent them, they become angrier at the same time that it becomes harder for them to imagine egalitarian relations or doing without a representative.
\n\nIn any case, the problems that caused people to get unruly in 2020 have not been resolved. There’s still tremendous potential, tremendous need.
\n\nIn this context, anarchists in the United States are still grasping for new models. There has been a boom in interest in labor organizing, but we have yet to see workers overcome the structural impediments that have made it so difficult to build a contemporary labor movement with teeth over the past several decades.
\n\nWe have sought to contribute analysis to these efforts, exploring the emergence of anti-work sentiments in the wake of the pandemic and studying what we can learn about how the economy has changed by comparing the general strikes of 1946 and 2011. On the same theme, we published an interview with Antijob, a Russian anarchist labor defense platform, and a history and analysis of graduate worker organizing at Columbia University, documenting how confronting the union bureaucracy has been essential to every victory across two decades.
\n\nBesides labor organizing, most of the newer struggles in the US in 2022 have been defensive projects focusing on public space—protecting homeless encampments, resisting sweeps, defending wilderness. The defense of the Atlanta forest represents one of the most promising of these experiments, bringing together an array of different issues and tactics and producing new constellations of diverse social bodies. The participants succeeded in establishing a months-long autonomous zone, building a movement that is affirmative and generative as well as defensive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/08/09/14.jpg\")
The burnt wreckage of a truck belonging to a developer in an occupied stretch of the Atlanta forest in summer 2022.
\nAlthough their electoral efforts have failed to secure them a firm grip on legislative or executive power in the United States, the far right has succeeded in solidifying their control in certain parts of the country. The same thing has occurred in France, Brazil, and other parts of the world, while outright fascists came to power in Italy this year. While centrists reign triumphant, the far right has consolidated a position as the chief alternative to the prevailing order, marginalizing those who would counterpose the possibility of revolutionary transformation and thereby serving centrists as a threat to keep potential revolutionaries in line. Future revolutionary movements will have to figure out how to overcome this challenge.
\n\nIn the street, elements of the far right have continued to experiment with new models of their own. In January 2022, a truck convoy established occupations and blockades along the Canadian border on the pretext of opposing COVID-19 lockdown measures, initiating a weeks-long standoff. (For our part, we were most sympathetic to the students who organized walkouts against institutional carelessness in the face of the pandemic.) Later, supporters of Bolsonaro emulated Canadian and Chilean truck blockades after he lost the Brazilian election of 2022.
\n\nThe year is ending with an ominous series of attacks on power stations in North Carolina and the Northwest. There are indications that these, too, may be the work of white supremacists experimenting with a new tactic to destabilize society and exert pressure. While the anti-social nature of such tactics might prevent fascists from building legitimacy with society at large, they would serve to play the role of terrorizing people into the arms of the reigning authorities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/2.jpg\")
Graffiti on a housing defense barricade in Portland, Oregon in 2020.
\nThis year saw a steady assault on gender and reproductive autonomy from Republicans and fascists across the United States, while heads of state like Vladimir Putin have made homophobia into one of the chief points in their program. Rhetoric about “groomers” has helped fascists to continue polarizing people towards transphobia and homophobia, though their attacks on drag queen story hours and the like have not brought out anything comparable to the mobilizations of fascists in Washington, DC and the northwest in late 2020.
\n\nThe Supreme Court decisions of 2022 contributed to the impression that we are still living in the Trump era, while the lackluster grassroots response showed the extent to which the spirit of 2020 has been successfully suppressed. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, for example, the ensuing protests were divided distinctly into passive liberal street marches and clandestine invite-only direct action. This a classic symptom of a waning movement, in which professional organizers dictate what happens in mass gatherings while a few isolated radicals continue to try to escalate out of contact with a social base that could join them.
\n\nFor our part, in response to the assault on abortion access, we produced a poster, proposed a strategy to employ direct action to push back on the authorities, and published an interview with activists who assist people in accessing abortions in defiance of draconian Polish anti-abortion laws in hopes of equipping people in the United States to defend and extend abortion access here.
\n\nIn response to the wave of legislation, mass shootings, and fascist mobilizations targeting trans and queer people, we published an analysis spelling out the case for gender self-determination and proposing a framework for resistance. We also published a do-it-yourself guide to producing transdermal estrogen in hopes of making it easier for people to take the care they desire into their own hands.
\n\nAs in the United States, people in many other parts of the world are caught between an unsatisfactory ruling capitalist centrism and a far right that is not quite powerful enough to achieve supremacy but still poses a credible threat. The global wave of revolts of 2019 was undercut by the pandemic, which largely benefitted the center and the far right—in that order—outside the US. Since then, war, environmental catastrophes, and other disasters have mostly immobilized people rather than remobilizing them. In France, last October, many people anticipated a new round of protests about the rising cost of living, hoping that these might become a sequel to the Yellow Vest movement of 2018-2019. Yet the demonstrations turned out to be underwhelming. Perhaps, when the government can blame all economic problems on Russia, it is difficult for outrage to gain traction, especially with far-right presidential candidate Marine le Pen having done so well in the last election.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/4.jpg\")
A banner in Brazil in 2019, celebrating the global wave of revolts that year.
\nIn this situation, it appears that no one on the statist left has any bold new ideas or proposals. This is most dramatically evident in Brazil, where Workers Party presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the 2022 election—but by a much narrower margin than he did in 2002 and with much of the promise that he originally represented discredited almost a decade ago now. Instead, in Brazil, the chief function of the Bolsonaro years has been to discipline those who voted for Lula out of the aspirations that inspired them to revolt in 2013.
\n\nIt seems to be a defining feature of our era that the difficulties of survival regularly provoke revolt on a scale that exceeds any particular subculture or demographic, but that these movements have thus far almost universally failed to bring about fundamental changes. None of the pat answers for this conundrum (e.g., that it indicates the supposed need for a centralized authoritarian party) have helped anyone to produce different results. It still remains to us to hit upon new ways of living and fighting that are adequate to the crises of our times.
\n\nConsequently, the most significant new development of 2022 has been the spread of war.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/1.jpg\")
“No war but the class war.”
\nStarting on the very first day of 2022, the rising cost of living and the end of fuel subsidies sparked protests in Kazakhstan. Within days, an insurrection erupted in Almaty, the country’s largest city. The armies of six nations coordinated to suppress it.
\n\nThe uprising in Kazakhstan was only the latest in a long chain of events indicating how much pressure people are under in the former Soviet Union, both from economic privation and authoritarian domination. It was preceded by the brutal suppression of various protest movements in Russia and Belarus; in summer 2022, unrest also broke out in Uzbekistan. This situation came to a head with the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the end of February.
\n\nWe covered the situation leading up to the invasion from the Ukrainian side of the border, then reported on the anti-war movement in Russia.
\n\nIn the buildup to the invasion, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin cynically lured refugees who were fleeing armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other parts of Asia and Africa by promising them a safe migration route through Belarus to the European Union. While the European Union made some provisions to receive Ukrainian women (and trans men) who were permitted to flee the war, they heartlessly left refugees from other parts of the world stranded at the Belarusian border, starving and freezing in limbo between the two power blocs. We published an article detailing anarchists’ efforts to defy Polish law to get assistance to these refugees.
\n\nPanning back, we can see the invasion of Ukraine continued a process of militarization and displacement that had already gotten underway in Syria. Amid ecological collapse and war—the side effects of capital accumulation and its consequences—more and more people are being forced into exile around the world. One thing anarchists can focus on doing better in the future is to help refugees—whether from Ukraine, Central African Republic, or New Orleans—to develop political agency wherever they end up. Towards that end, we published an interview with Syrian refugees who managed to establish a collective in Paris and to continue to organize on an international scale.
\n\nThe invasion of Ukraine is likely an indication of things to come. Over the past several decades, governments worldwide have invested billions of dollars in crowd control technology and military equipment while taking precious few steps to address mounting inequalities or the destruction of the natural world. As economic and ecological crises intensify, more governments will seek to solve their domestic problems by initiating hostilities with their neighbors. Now that Russia is too distracted to call the shots in its previous sphere of influence, we are already seeing signs of this in Turkey’s eagerness to resume invading Rojava and in new conflicts between Azerbaijan and Armenia and, further to the east, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. At the same time, we are seeing saber-rattling in Serbia about Kosovo, in China and the United States about Taiwan, and elsewhere around the globe.
\n\nThough the war in Ukraine has generated difficult debates among anarchists, we had better take these seriously if we are likely to confront similar situations elsewhere in the future. For our part, we have continued to report on anti-war protests and draft resistance in Russia. We also published an interview with a clandestine collective of anarchist combatants carrying out sabotage actions against Putin’s war effort.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/5.jpg\")
Art by NO Bonzo.
\nElsewhere, 2022 was less eventful, for good or ill. With the exception of Ecuador, which experienced a reprise of the uprising of October 2019 in 2022, and Sudan, where street mobilizations have continued periodically all year, most of the places that saw uprisings in 2019 have been quiet this year. The powerful movement in Hong Kong that helped set the tone for autumn 2019 has effectively been suppressed, though unrest has finally begun to spread in China. The movement in Chile, which arguably achieved the most out of all the 2019 uprisings, was effectively channeled into electoral politics via the promise of replacing the Pinochet-era constitution, and consequently ran aground as the right wing finally regained the initiative.
\n\nThis past summer and fall, we published analyses from the Philippines and Brazil about the ways that electoral politics have served to strengthen the extreme right while giving centrists a pretext to discourage anarchist and anti-fascist organizing.
\n\nThis year’s most promising movements have taken place outside the epicenters of wealth and power. The revolt in Iran has initiated change in Iranian society at large, if not within the Iranian government, while the occupation movement in Sri Lanka succeeded in temporarily chasing the head of state out of the country. These victories will be reference points for the struggles of 2023.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/8.jpg\")
Anti-authoritarian revolutionaries facing off with the forces of the military dictatorship in Sudan in fall 2022.
\nThis year, we published a collective oral history of the historic protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund of April 2000. We also published a retrospective on the Gezi Park uprising in summer 2013, recalling a moment of optimism and possibility in Turkey and analyzing the ways that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan consolidated autocratic power in the years that followed.
\n\nIn response to a destructive police raid on People’s Park, the longstanding commons in Berkeley, California, we produced a poster honoring Rosebud Abigail Denovo, an anarchist who was murdered by police while defending the park against an eviction threat in 1992.
\n\nFinally, one of the texts we most enjoyed putting together this year is “Punk: Dangerous Utopia.” This has just appeared as the foreword to a book about the intersections between punk and anarchism, published in the United Kingdom by Active Distribution. Punk was profoundly influential in introducing hundreds of thousands of people to participatory, horizontal, and decentralized models for organizing and culture, and there is still a lot we can learn from it today.
\n\nBefore we knew that Elon Musk would personally boot us off Twitter, we published a history tracing the trajectory of Twitter from its origins as a street protest tool to the billionaire’s acquisition of the platform.
\n\nBut long before that particular debacle, we knew we should not permit our access to the general public to depend on the good will of corporate executives. In 2022, we produced three new posters and twelve new zines in a total of ten different languages. This coming year, we’ll continue to publish new print projects.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/6.jpg\")
“When Donald Trump was booted off of Twitter after January 6, it became inevitable that someone from his faction of the ruling class would seek to take over the company,” as we wrote in “Canary in the Coal Mine.”
\nIn December 2008, after the Greek insurrection, a small number of anarchists intentionally promoted two tactical proposals as a way to break out of the impasse that summit-hopping and other approaches from the so-called “anti-globalization era” had reached. These were university occupations and anti-police revolt. Although both of these had occurred in the United States before, these anarchists believed that they had untapped potential.
\n\nThese experiments began humbly, with a few dozen people occupying buildings at the New School in New York and a few hundred people rioting in Oakland after Oscar Grant was murdered. The former led indirectly (via the “Occupy Everything” slogan of the student occupation movement and the subsequent occupation of the capitol building in Madison) to Occupy; the latter set a precedent for the revolts in Ferguson and later, in May 2020, Minneapolis. The long-term potential of those models was not immediately apparent in their awkward beginnings, nor were the permutations that the movements arising from those initial examples would undergo.
\n\nWe are once again at the beginning of a new era that will pose new challenges. This is the time to propose new tactics, new strategies, new horizons for experimentation.
\n\nAs you undertake projects of your own this coming year, imagine that these are not just ways to address immediate needs or respond to emergencies, but also opportunities to shape the imaginations of thousands of others like you. Imagine what it would look like to develop new models for revolt in an era of scarcity and ecological crisis, when people desperately need new ways to access and share space and resources. Imagine that your efforts could give rise to new experiments that will be infectious and that these will evolve in unpredictable ways. How can you contribute to this process? How can you accelerate it? How can you approach your own humble efforts as a step towards the movements of the future?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/12/29/7.jpg\")
Those who hold power today may appear invulnerable, but nothing lasts forever.
\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. ↩
\nOn the weekend of May 15-16, 2021, voters across Chile chose delegates to attend the convention that will compose a new constitution for the country. This vote, itself, was a concession earned via the uprising of 2019. The right wing was soundly defeated in these elections, but no institutional left party gained a majority, either. The corporate media are heralding this as a victory for “independent” politics—but what will this mean for the autonomous movements that gave the left politicians momentum in the first place? In the following analysis, our correspondent in Chile explores the irreconcilable tension between the politics of representation and the politics of direct action.
\n\nThe electoral victory for the non-institutional left in Chile is the latest development in a story that has been going on for years, from the “Pink Tide” that brought left politicians like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to power in Brazil to the victory of Syriza in Greece following the movements of 2011. In each of these cases, the failures of right-wing and centrist politics paved the way for these electoral victories. But left parties have struggled to deliver on their promises, and even more extreme right-wing politicians have succeeded them—Bolsonaro in Brazil, New Democracy in Greece. How can horizontal social movements navigate the situation arising from left electoral victories, so as to ensure that their prospects are not tied to the fate of political parties and governments?
\n\nChile has a history of right-wing anti-government direct action, which further complicates matters. In an era when state power is like a hot potato that can burn whoever holds it, even at moments when it seems that the ruling order has been defeated, we should look into the future and prepare for the next round.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/9.jpg\")
\nAhead of the constitutional referendum last October, we offered these thoughts on the upcoming wave of electoral campaigns:
\n\n\n\n\nAlthough the one-year anniversary of the Chilean revolt is quickly approaching, we are unsure of what the future holds in Santiago. We have seen the discourse surrounding this movement shift from a movement for Dignidad (dignity) to a movement against the constitution inherited from Pinochet’s dictatorship. On October 25, a week after the anniversary of the Chilean revolt, Chileans will vote in a nationwide referendum to decide whether to hold a convention to rewrite the constitution inherited from Pinochet. The institutional left is quick to blame society’s ills on the current constitution—it is a way to divert attention from how the institutional arrangements between the dictatorship and its opposition created this situation… when they supplanted the thousands who fought bravely against the military and police in the streets to become the designated leaders of Pinochet’s opposition.
\n\nConsequently, our present conflict pits the new community of revolt against both the state and its institutional opposition. This struggle will determine whether the Chilean revolt will be about living life with dignity or perpetuating the institutional arrangements that alienate us from our experiences, our histories, and each other. Despite the ways that the suspension of protests has rendered the community of revolt invisible, we see its presence everywhere… The movements in the streets have a greater role than just “protecting street marches” or applying pressure to whatever public official walks through the revolving doors of state governance. They serve to create the conditions for other ideas to take hold, for other possibilities to take root.
\n
The weekend of May 15-16, 2021 saw a mega-election in which voters nationwide chose from candidates competing to be city mayors, city council representatives, and delegates to the convention that is to compose a new constitution for Chile. This was originally planned for April 15, but political parties agreed to postpone the election a month and hold it over two days, in response to the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile.
\n\nThe neighborhood assemblies and social organizations that have participated in these elections emphasize three main principles regarding how political governance should function in Chile:
\n\n1.)\tPopular sovereignty: Change the political system to make the government reflect the interests of everyday Chileans and not the political class (both left and right) that has thus far governed via institutional arrangements. Respond to longstanding social demands which up until now have gone un-answered.
\n\n2.)\tPopular power: Politicians should represent the interests of social movements, the non-institutional social organizations via which everyday Chileans articulate their social demands.
\n\n3.)\tTerritorial autonomy: Change the centralized political system that gives far more power to the national government at the cost of local municipalities that have an immediate connection to everyday Chileans.
\n\nIn the months since the referendum, political parties and social organizations compiled lists of candidates and campaigned in these elections. Social organizations had an opportunity to act like political parties, creating their own electoral slates for the constitutional convention and holding their own primaries to choose mayoral candidates.
\n\nThe right wing was sure that they would gain the full one third of votes that they needed to obtain veto power in the constitutional convention. In an interview last February, the Secretary of State, Jaime Bellolio, asserted that, in the elections to determine who will participate in the process to establish a new Chilean constitution,
\n\n\n\n\n“We believe that we are going to win 3-0: Vamos Por Chile is going to be the most voted list, it is going to be the list that it is going to get the greatest amount of constituents, and it is going to be the list that by itself will get 1/3 of the constituents.”
\n
That’s not how things turned out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/1.jpg\")
\nWhile many neighborhood assemblies organized to promote their own candidates, anarchist assemblies attempted to read the present situation and determine our position in this shifting institutional terrain. Ahead of last weekend’s mega-election, anti-institutional tendencies assumed the following would occur:
\n\n1.) There would be low turnouts in the polls, which would skew the votes in favor of the right.
\n\n2.) The right would gain at least one third of the seats in the constitutional convention, enabling them to block any major institutional changes.
\n\nThere was indeed a low turnout: only 43% of eligible voters came to the polls. But even though this low turnout signals a lack of the “popular participation” that the institutional left associates with its principles of popular sovereignty and popular power, the right wing suffered a major loss in the elections. Moreover, no coalition of political parties gained veto power, because independent candidates won 42% of the convention seats. The corporate media here in Chile has presented “the independents” as the major winner of the constitutional convention election, an emergent political bloc emerging from the estallido social (the “social outburst,” i.e., the 2019 uprising). But these independents are not a composed coalition—they are a patchwork of different slates, different candidates from different social organizations, and different histories of political activity in Chile.
\n\nThis creates a unique situation in which there is no single political party or leader that represents the entirety of the social movements.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/12.jpg\")
“Tia Pikachu.”
\nNotable winners in the constitutional delegate election include “Tia Pikachu,” a 43-year-old school bus driver in Santiago, who became an icon of the protests in Plaza Dignidad and won a seat in the constitutional convention in the “lista del pueblo” slate, and Machi Francisca Linconao, a human rights defender and Mapuche spiritual leader.1
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MujeresRed/status/992793289555357696\n\n\n
Some anarchists have suggested that, in 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. According to this theory, alternative tendencies and political practices can flourish so long as they are able to present themselves as opponents of ruling order, but these tendencies tend to lose popular support once they are reduced to political platforms that politicians can claim to represent, or else become associated—rightly or wrongly—with the governing party.
\n\nIn Chile, the dominant political parties failed to gain a foothold in the constitutional convention because they all presented visions of technocratic crisis management, which has been discredited by the Chilean uprising and the COVID-19 pandemic.
\n\nMore people participated in the 2017 presidential election than the May 2021 election. In 2017, the current president, Sebastián Piñera, won with 53% of the vote. Piñera’s supporters pointed to Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, threatening that Chile could experience the same problems if it strayed from its neoliberal path. They also mobilized anti-immigrant fears: almost two million immigrants, most of them from Venezuela, have fled to Chile in order to escape economic crises elsewhere. The right wing warned that a victory of the Frente Amplio (a relatively recent left coalition) or the socialist party would turn the country into a “Chilezuela” with rampant inflation, high unemployment, evaporating pension funds, social unrest, and empty grocery stores, declaring that the only way to ensure a stable future was to stick to right-wing neoliberal policies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/10.jpg\")
The specter of “a ‘Chilezuela’ with rampant inflation, high unemployment, evaporating pension funds, social unrest, and empty grocery stores.”
\nIronically, the reality of an unstable “Chilezuela” has materialized under the right-wing government. While the revolt proved that there was widespread disillusionment with Chile’s neoliberal model, the state response to COVID-19 showed that it was incapable of responding to crisis. So far, the government’s chief form of economic relief has been to allow Chileans to withdraw 10% from their state-managed private pensions (AFP). In June 2020, the first major protests since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic took place, as people demanded that the government approved these withdrawals; the government approved two withdrawals in June and December. In April 2021, congress sought to approve a third withdrawal, and Piñera did everything in his power to block it. The right wing feared that these withdrawals could irreparably damage the mega-corporations that the AFPs invest in.
\n\nThe right had enough congressional seats to block the vote. If congress passed it, Piñera could challenge congress in the Supreme Court, which many feared would side with him. Yet after apparently considering Piñera’s abysmal approval rating (roughly 15%) and the upcoming elections, over two thirds of congress approved the law, including many representatives from Piñera’s party. That same day, Piñera spoke on TV, flanked by the two most promising right-wing presidential candidates, Joaquín Lavín and Evelyn Mathei, announcing that he would challenge congress in the Supreme Court. A week later, the Supreme Court ruled against Piñera and approved the law.
\n\nThe system of governance of Chile has historically invested a great deal of power in the executive branch of the federal government; this predates Pinochet’s constitution of 1981. No matter how politicians from the governing party coalition try to distance themselves from the president, their success in elections is tied to the president’s actions and policies. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Piñera declared a state of emergency, introducing restrictions on movement and assembly and concentrating even more power in the executive branch.
\n\nThe government’s failure to recuperate the revolt and the economic and social crises attending the pandemic enabled the opposition to build power by showing the weakness of Chile’s neoliberal system. While Piñera’s approval rating plummeted and his disapproval rating skyrocketed, the coalition of right-wing parties fractured as their politicians tried to present themselves as an opposition to Piñera. This proved futile, as their political visions were pegged to the neoliberal model that had failed to offer stability through the waves of crisis that began in 2019.
\n\nAt the same time, the political opposition was also associated with the technocratic model of governance that has preserved neoliberalism in Chile for years after the Pinochet dictatorship. Widely seen as part of the same political class as the parties that hold power, these politicians represent the paradigm of the “transition to democracy” that sought to maintain stability by slowly reforming the policies of the dictatorship. Pursuing bipartisan agreements, developing policies informed by university-trained experts, they represented the promise that the state could progressively ease the catastrophic social effects of the neoliberal model.
\n\nWhile they proved themselves to be out of touch with the “social demands” of the social uprising, they also made themselves irrelevant by failing to block any of the “officialist” policies. When Piñera required congressional approval to extend the state of emergency after one year, the opposition criticized his policies but nonetheless approved the extension. These opposition parties had hoped for increased financial relief and social assistance—in particular, stimulus checks and price controls (which are unconstitutional, but could in theory be implemented during a state of emergency). Yet the executive government refused to implement most of these proposals. Every step of the way, the opposition spoke about how they would manage the crisis if they were in power, or if the 1981 constitution was changed. However, they proved the poverty of the parliamentary model, as they were unable to push forward alternative projects, even during a state of emergency when it was possible to sidestep the Pinochet-era constitution.
\n\nPrior to the Estallido Social, the coalition Frente Amplio was the poster child of the new Chilean left, presenting a vision of electoral politics that broke with the institutional opposition. This coalition emerged from the 2011 student movement, specifically the Autonomist movement, which sought to break the Chilean Communist Party’s commanding role over social movements. Their political platform was supposed to be informed by listening to Chile’s grassroots social movements rather than to technocrats. Their representatives in congress were supposed to represent their parties’ base, only voting in congress according to the consensus of the party members. Their members would be active members of social movements and autonomous neighborhood activities in order to keep a finger on the pulse of social issues that their elected representatives could address. The coalition gained 20% of the presidential vote in 2017 and elected two former student movement leaders into congress, Gabriel Boric and Giorgio Jackson.
\n\nYet rather than surging in popularity as the representative voice of the revolt, as such parties have in Greece and elsewhere, the party all but collapsed in the months following October 2019. At the peak of the uprising, while the Communist Party and other leftist parties refused negotiate with the far right, Boric went against the consensus of his party to sign the “Agreement to Peace and a New Constitution.” Later, he voted for the “Anti-barricade, Anti-looting, Anti-mask, and Anti-land occupation” law, which increased the penalties for the direct actions that were central to the Chilean revolt. Consequently, thousands of Frente Amplio militants and social organizations cut ties with the coalition. Former Frente Amplio militants recount being harassed in their neighborhoods and spit on in assemblies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/11.jpg\")
This image of Gabriel Boric sitting with the right wing to announce “Agreement to Peace and a New Constitution” has become a meme, appearing in reply to any posts that Frente Amplio politicians make on social media.
\nThe rise of independent candidates in this election is a direct rejection of the contradictions of the new Chilean left, in which young politicians claim to represent popular power and social movements yet vote against these very principles. Of the independent candidates elected to the constitutional convention, many were political party militants who left Frente Amplio and members of social organizations who decided they could only gain political power by winning their own seats in office. Others were activists who had never trusted electoral politics until now, but consider this constitutional convention the first time in Chilean history that politicians and the Chilean elite could be kept out of writing the constitution.
\n\nThe new alternative is represented by the various independent blocs that won in the constitutional delegate elections. In many ways, this represents an attempt to develop an electoral politics to re-work the state in response to the failures seen in Venezuela, Bolivia, and other countries that have experienced the so-called “Pink Tide,” the surge of left electoral victories at the beginning of the 21st century. For those on the left, no central figure or political party embodies the hopes and desires of the current moment of change. For the political elite and the right wing, it appears that there will be no left regime to boycott or demand foreign intervention against.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/8.jpg\")
The newly elected Communist Party mayor of Santiago.
\nDespite the crisis of legitimacy of the Chilean political system, some people have maintained more faith in municipal politics. The left has sought to gain power in local elections, ostensibly to challenge national government’s policies when they go against the wishes of locals. The metropolitan centers of Chile—Santiago, Viña del Mar, and Valparaiso—have all elected or re-elected left-wing mayors. These candidates’ victories were due to presenting themselves as instruments for Chilean social movements. Leading up to the Mayoral elections, the Communist Party and social organizations put forward an alternative primary election, called “Alcaldia Constituyente,” in which the cities could vote on mayoral candidates put forward by social organizations and political parties. The low turnout for this primary became a meme in Santiago, with photos of empty polling stations circulating on social media. Nonetheless, the Communist Party candidate and current City Councilwoman, Irací Hassler, won the primary and later won the election to become Santiago’s first Communist mayor in recent memory.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/3.jpg\")
Banner in Parque Forestal, Santiago, reading “No More Tear Gas, you are poisoning us!”
\nHassler defeated the incumbent Santiago Mayor, Jorge Alessandri, an active opponent of the weekly protests in Plaza Dignidad and the informal vendors in Santiago’s streets. In the first weeks of the Estallido Social, neighborhood assemblies proliferated throughout Santiago. Hassler, already on the Santiago City Council, was actively involved in her assembly in Parque Forestal, a neighborhood directly adjacent to Plaza de la Dignidad. The current mayor, Jorge Alessandri, actively coordinated with police to militarize Plaza Dignidad, exposing residents daily to tear gas, rubber bullets, and armored vehicles charging through the streets at protestors. In interviews, Hassler consistently emphasized the daily police brutality that threatened neighbors in the area, which posed more of a risk than the specter of delinquency that Alessandri continued to allude to.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/16.jpg\")
\nFor now, members of the institutional left are asking themselves the following questions regarding political strategy: How can we prevent the right wing from building power and influencing governance? What new forms of governance can allow the new political system to better respond to crises?
\n\nBut we should be asking ourselves different questions: What role will autonomous, ungovernable force play in social conflicts and crises? How can we prepare to act differently from the autonomous tendencies in the past, who failed to break away from the institutional left and ultimately faded into irrelevance?
\n\nIn scrutinizing the failures of previous left-wing governments that also claimed to represent “the people,” we might learn more about the messy world of attachments, heresies, allegiances, and patronage. The problem with enthusiasm about the constitutional convention is that it can distract us from everything that we can do outside the terrain of (representational) politics, while the conceptual framework it presumes also leaves us unprepared for what right-wing movements can do outside the terrain of (representational) politics. The risk is that we will let the right wing gain momentum as the new “anti-state” force (with all the ironies already banally familiar from the Trump era), while left movements end up relying on the police to suppress right-wing movements—the same police that will eventually be used to suppress us when the right wing rides that momentum back into power.
\n\nExamining how to employ direct action in ongoing social conflicts will ensure that we continue to have a means to assert autonomous positions in a terrain that will otherwise increasingly confine the solutions to crisis to a framework of new and improved governance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/13.jpg\")
Sabotage targeting a logging truck in rural Chile.
\nIn the metropolitan centers, it’s easy to forget that extractive industries are the foundation of the Chilean economy: mining, industrial logging plantations, and industry fisheries. In the Chilean hinterland, these industries have been in a decades-long conflict with local Indigenous communities, who seek to reclaim their land and halt the disastrous harm that these industries have been inflicting on their territories. Since the 1990s, Mapuche communities have increasingly turned to direct action to exert territorial autonomy. After decades of failed promises that institutional reforms would help Mapuche communities to regain their land and limit industries’ ecological impact, several land occupation movements got underway. Some of these started with the participants holding ceremonies and events on the usurped land, then building houses and planting crops there. Every year, more acts of sabotage have destroyed forestry companies’ logging equipment, more rural protests have barricaded rural logging roads, and more logging trucks have been hijacked by anonymous and armed highway robbers.
\n\nAs the conflict over ecological devastation and property is bound to continue in the Chilean hinterland, Mapuche communities will continue to take direct action rather than wait for promised institutional reforms. In response, even without representation in government, the far right could gain power in the hinterland by utilizing direct action towards their own interests.
\n\nFor example, after a truck driver was injured during an armed robbery, Chile’s largest truck unions declared a strike to demand increased government protection in rural Chile. For seven days, truckers blocked cargo transportation on every on-ramp to the Pan-American highway in Araucanía as well as other rural sections of that highway. In the rural Chilean towns blocked by the strike, grocery stores ran out of basic goods and gas stations rationed fuel. At the same time, the striking truckers throw a party on the freeway in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Videos circulating online showed the striking workers dancing with strippers they hired to attend their party.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/5.jpg\")
The trucker strike.
\nBoth Indigenous peoples and the Chilean left denounced the truckers as right-wing, sexist, and potentially fascist. In this evaluation, they were correct. But at the heart of the leftist critique was a condemnation of the right-wing government’s double standard: brutalizing the protesters in Plaza Dignidad but leaving the striking truck drivers alone. While the carabineros employed all the force at their disposal to quell any social protest in Plaza Dignidad, the national government ended the strike by meeting the drivers’ demands and guaranteeing increased policing in an already militarized region.
\n\nRather than developing a strategy for how to engage in social conflicts like these outside of electoral politics, the left imagines that these problems will disappear once the new Chilean constitution is created. Behind the critique of the right-wing strike is the reality that the left, while condemning the state for not cracking down on right-wing social movements, has no strategy for what to do when groups use the power of logistical disruption to push right-wing demands by being ungovernable. While the leftist delegates in the constitutional convention envision a Chilean society that acknowledges its debts to Indigenous peoples and puts a stop to the rampant police violence against Indigenous communities, they have no strategy to respond to right-wing groups who use economic power to prevent such social reforms.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/4.jpg\")
A protest in Los Lagos, Chile against the salmon industry.
\nIn part, this is because the dream of a future Chilean political system that responds to the demands of social movements takes for granted that social movements will always be inherently anti-neoliberal and inherently “of the people.” Popular. But who are the people? As we have seen in Brazil and elsewhere in the world, the far right can also grow through social movements that make this same claim to representing “the people.” Dismissing social movements like the truckers’ strike as right-wing and in the interests of the economic elite provides an easy alibi for not confronting tough questions with complex answers. For example, it is assumed that the new constitution should guarantee workers safety and Indigenous rights—but what happens when workers claim that Indigenous people are threatening their safety? Why do workers continue to adopt right-wing politics when a new government in power is trying to represent their interests?
\n\nSome of the possible futures emerging from this election.
\n\nIf we don’t develop a strategy for how to engage in social conflicts outside electoral politics, we risk leaving ourselves with few tactics as we confront the social conflicts that will indubitably occur outside of the new institutional arrangements. The leftist notion of the labor strike—leveraging the economic power of the working class—does not address the scale of the economic and labor power the elite can also leverage when pushed out of political institutions.
\n\nThe danger is that after the constitutional convention, left and autonomous movements will abandon the terrain of ungovernability and economic disruption to the right wing. We can see how in Venezuela, the imposed economic sanctions and the war of wealthy business owners against the Chavez regime both increased generalized suffering, showing the weakness of the government when it came to responding to the crisis they generated and effectively reducing the range of possibility to the double bind of Chavista or anti-Chavista—a catastrophe for horizontal autonomous movements. Rather than taking at face value the promise of a better society under a new and improved constitution, we must confront the historical precedent that the right wing and economic elites will leverage their economic power to throw any newly constituted “revolutionary” government into crisis.
\n\nThe Allende years offer an obvious example of this. Kissinger declared that he would end the Allende regime by making the Chilean economy scream; Chile’s metropolitan regions starved as the coalition of anti-Allende forces cut off the country’s logistics. This was not just the result of international policy and economic sanctions blocking the country’s imports. Food also ceased to make it into the metropolitan centers, basic goods stayed in warehouses, and imports were trapped in the ports. The right wing grew in power with each far-right labor strike coupled with economic sanctions, by presenting the rampant unemployment, the rationing of basic goods, and increased daily struggles for survival as a sign of socialism’s political illegitimacy.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/paddydocherty/status/1267127257090404354\n\n\n
There are several reasons why workers in these industries sided with their employers rather than the Allende government. Many simply decided to support the more powerful side that they assumed would better guarantee their personal security amid the country’s economic crisis. The norms of patron/client relationships endure in Chile; for some workers, it was a safer bet to maintain the patronage of their employer than to seek the patronage of the national government. Some workers received immediate rewards for supporting their employers; others feared their employers’ retribution. These labor strikes presented a complex situation in which some labor unions disrupted the economy to demand the end of a government that ostensibly represented “their interests.”
\n\nThe success of these strikes showed that the façade of “political power” via representation in the Chilean state meant little compared to the economic power that capitalist interests were able to leverage through logistical disruption. In Hinterland, Philip Neel argues that the leftist emphasis on new models of popular representation—popular among the denizens of metropolitan centers—fails to consider the understandings of power in the hinterland and, in turn, opens up spaces for far-right cooptation:
\n\n\n\n\n“The real political advance visible in the far right—and the thing that has made possible its ascendance—is the pragmatic focus on questions of power, which are religiously ignored by the American leftist, who instead focuses on building elaborate political programs and ornate utopias, as if politics were the exercise of one’s imagination. It is this focus on building power in the midst of crisis that distinguishes the partisan from the leftist, and the oath is the present organizational form of partisanship.”
\n
The constitutionalist strategy, by promising future security on the condition that people sacrifice in the present, is the same strategy adopted by the previous politicians of the neoliberal institutional order. While at present, the Chilean right has been shattered due to its association with Pinochet-era state politics, a massive institutional overhaul could create the conditions for the right to adopt the tools of economic disruption once again, benefitting from an era when it is not difficult to mobilize people against the ruling party.
\n\nAccording to Neel, “By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions.” Just as crisis created the conditions for a constitutional convention by laying bare the weakness of the previous institutional order, crisis will also create the conditions for the growth of the non-institutional far right by laying bare the weakness of the new institutional politics.
\n\nAnd the hot potato will change hands again.
\n\nIn the irreconcilable tension between the politics of direct action and the politics of representation, we face the danger that a future constitutional order could perpetuate the same politics of “law and order” that produced the current police apparatus in Chile. Until now, the state has maintained stability amid escalating social conflicts by militarizing the police and expanding the carceral system.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/15.jpg\")
Sebastian Pinera presenting the jungle command, a special police force trained in Colombia.
\nFor example, starting in the early 2000s, the national government radically expanded the police apparatus in “the red zone of the Mapuche conflict.” Through racially discriminatory protocols, police began to systematically detain Mapuche activists and community leaders. This created the conditions for Chilean police to detain or murder countless Mapuche youth, as in the case of Camilo Catrillanca, killed in 2017. They began to hold Mapuche people for months or years before their trials, using racist judicial reforms that normalized “preventative detention” against suspects who were presented as threats to public safety. During the Estallido Social, the Chilean police and courts adopted this same system of preventative detention, with the consequence that thousands of prisoners from the revolt are still in jail awaiting trail.
\n\nThe constitutional convention envisions a future Chilean political arrangement that reduces social conflict by finally conceding to social movement’s longstanding social demands.
\n\nOf the demands of the revolt, the demand to free all political prisoners is likely the most controversial. Days after their electoral victory in the constitutional convention, the list “del pueblo” announced that they would not negotiate with the right until all prisoners of the revolt are free. Others demand that all the Mapuche political prisoners jailed under the current racially discriminatory judicial system must also be freed as a condition of the constitutional convention. After all, the current opportunity to re-write the Chilean constitution is partly the consequence of the brave and militant political action of these political prisoners. Furthermore, if Chile is to acknowledge and address its debt to Indigenous people, this includes dismantling its systemic judicial racism against the Mapuche people jailed for their struggle for autonomy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/6.jpg\")
In August 2020, protesters in a Mapuche political prisoner solidarity march took over the City Hall of Curacautin, Araucania. Later, an angry mob violently evicted them.
\nYet once again, this constitutional project of freeing political prisoners and demilitarizing the Chilean police as a concession to social movements’ demands does not include a strategy regarding how constitutional politics should address direct action in pursuit of right-wing demands. Against the politics of representation, the central philosophy of direct action is that it is possible to leverage economic and social power to force governments or public institutions to concede to demands. It should not be surprising if, faced with less police protection of their property and seeing their longtime enemies released from jail, the far right utilizes direct action to pursue their own agenda.
\n\nFacing this strategy, it seems entirely plausible that a new political arrangement could opt to maintain the same policing and judicial apparatus as a concession to the far right—or even as a purported way to control far-right violence (as we see Democrats in the United States clamoring to do in response to the events of January 6)—while claiming to care deeply about their historic debts to Indigenous peoples and political prisoners. The governments of Syriza, in Greece, and Dilma Rousseff, in Brazil, did exactly that, paving the way in both cases for the repression of the social movements that had originally supported them.
\n\nIn a political crisis triggered by escalating direct actions from both the right and the left—as occurred, for example, in Brazil in 2013—the politics of law and order presents itself as a means of maintaining stability. In Araucanía, the right-wing truckers’ strike is just one example of broader right-wing organizing. Agrarian business associations are petitioning the government to increase the police presence in the area while former military personnel organize self-defense groups to protect their property, a step towards the sort of paramilitary violence familiar in Colombia. Armed groups such as Comando Trizano and APRA have organized patrols on the pretext of defending landowners’ property; they doxx Mapuche and environmental activists to threaten them.
\n\nDespite the right wing describing it as terrorism, Mapuche direct action has taken the form of self-defense in this context of state- and extra-state violence against Mapuche communities. It is likely that, when the political tools of mediation and bipartisan accord reach their limits, political institutions that seek to govern will turn the tools of state violence against those who lay bare the fact that political representation cannot resolve the crises of our time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/7.jpg\")
A Mapuche land reclamation in Curacautin.
\nThe major success of independent candidates in the constitutional convention has created the conditions for people to talk about “independent” candidates as a new fourth bloc of power countering the three major coalitions of political parties. However, there is no unified “leftist” bloc in political power; these independent delegates come from an array of political tendencies and personal backgrounds. The fractured terrain of institutional politics presents a situation in which street politics could exacerbate the tensions between political parties and social movements. A fragmented parliamentary landscape may offer an opportunity to exploit politicians’ desire to be representatives in order to carve out spaces that are ungovernable.
\n\nOnce again, we can learn from the Allende years, during which leftist anti-institutional politics escalated throughout Chile while in parliament, Allende’s political coalitions jockeyed for power against the centrist political parties. Prior to Allende’s presidency, land occupation movements proliferated throughout Chile as rural campesinos and Santiago’s urban poor seized land to carve out spaces for life. In no small part, Salvador Allende’s electoral victory was a response to the police massacre of squatters in Puerto Montt during the Frei administration, a tragedy that Victor Jara eulogized in his song “Preguntas por Puerto Montt.”
\n\nVictor Jara: “Preguntas por Puerto Montt.” Jara was brutally tortured and extrajudicially murdered by army officers participating in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet; his corpse was tossed out on the streets of Santiago riddled with over 40 bullets. It took 42 years for his murderers to face charges. This is why we fight against the police and fascism.
\nWhile Allende’s promises of land reform and a socialist system led to his election, campesinos and pobladores continued to organize autonomous land occupations rather than waiting for the government’s promises to come true. A myriad of militant, autonomous revolutionary groups emerged in opposition to Allende’s program—the VOP (Vanguardia organizando el Pueblo) and the MIR (Movimiento Izquierda revolucionario) became the most prominent, gaining power in the squatter settlements that faced police brutality both before and after Allende’s election.
\n\nAlthough public rage against police violence towards squatters led to Allende’s election, under Allende, police once again killed a teenager while raiding a squatter settlement in Lo Hermida, Peñalolen. Leftist politicians jumped to the defense of the police, who had raided the settlement looking for weapons, declaring that the urban guerilla groups were outside agitators inciting the squatters to violence and that, by fighting against the police, the militant left was responsible for creating the situation in which an innocent teenager was killed. Despite politicians’ statements, public outcry against the police continued. After it was revealed that the victim was actually a member of the MIR, the MIR was able to discredit the accusations that they were “outside agitators.” Not all of the squatters were miristas, nor were all the miristas residents of the land occupation movement. Neither “insiders” nor “outsiders,” those involved were nonetheless fellow residents deeply committed to the squatter settlement’s daily life and shared future.
\n\nWhile Allende’s party was still opposed to groups like the MIR, on August 7, 1972, Allende attended the funeral of the MIRista teenager killed by the police. This conflict between the institutional and non-institutional left forced the state to legitimize the squatter settlement—a neighborhood that exists to this day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/14.jpg\")
Salvador Allende attending the funeral of the MIRista teenager murdered by police.
\nThe histories of autonomous left groups in Chile have been overshadowed by nostalgia for Salvador Allende. This is not the most tragic outcome of the Pinochet dictatorship, but it is an obstacle to learning from the past. Pinochet’s coup was followed by a campaign to disappear many of the revolutionaries involved in the neighborhood. The survivors of groups like the MIR were driven underground, abandoning their previous strategies of community organizing for the strategies of secretive anti-Pinochet armed revolt. Consequently, we will never know whether the internal tensions within Allende’s Unidad Popular could have offered opportunities to create ungovernable spaces. Nonetheless, one can imagine a moment of conflict in which elected officials, fearful of the political repercussions of evicting an autonomous space—whether a squat, an occupied plaza, or an encampment defending a forest—concede territory to autonomous ungovernable forces that remain active outside the electoral system.
\n\nJust as crisis created the conditions for the constitutional convention by laying bare the weakness of the previous institutional order, crisis also creates the conditions for the growth of other non-institutional tendencies that could respond to these crises and lay bare the weakness of the next institutional arrangements. The non-institutional far right has the opportunity to exploit and expand forthcoming crises, while promising security and stability if they are permitted to govern. Against the paradigm of responding to crisis through escalation and critique, we have to build an ungovernable force by expanding practices of autonomy that provide for our and others’ sustenance and well-being.
\n\nHere, we can learn from the economic collapses that often follow the ascension of left-wing governments, thanks to the machinations of the economic elite, and from the successes and failures of Allende-era projects to grapple with crises of production and logistics. In response to right-wing sanctions and sabotage, the Allende government adopted the first system of cybernetics, Project Cybersyn.
\n\nThis distributed-decision-making support system, receiving up to date economic and production information, sought to assist in factory self-management by receiving information from centers of production and sending out directives to factories after projecting simulated outcomes. By 1972, this system was able maintain Chile’s logistics despite increasingly effective right-wing truckers’ strikes.
\n\nThe enduring limit of such cybernetic interventions in production and distribution is its inability to account for the role the informal economy plays in ensuring access to resources within a territory. When the urban poor adopt side-hustles and sell products on the street as a basis of survival, cybernetic interventions see them as a threat to stability. Right-wing regimes criminalize such activities as urban blight; left-wing regimes do the same, branding them a “black market” that takes advantage of scarcity. Quite apart from ideological opposition to cybernetic solutions to economic crisis, projects that aim to establish a “planned economy” rarely produce their intended effects because they have to redirect or dismantle the heterogeneous systems created by people acting to secure their livelihoods.
\n\nHortalizeras, Mapuche farmers who sell their produce in the streets of Santiago, responding to a police raid on their unpermitted produce market.
\nMeanwhile, under Allende, the Communist Party and anti-Institutional leftist groups began to organize Juntas de Abastecimiento Popular (Popular Sustenance Councils, or JAPs) within urban territories to ensure access and fair prices for basic goods. Neighbors would take stock of what they had access to and share their available resources with their communities. As Benito Bravo argues, these autonomous neighborhood relief initiatives proliferate throughout Chile during times of crisis. As leftist groups became increasingly involved in such neighborhood initiatives, they draw more support because of their attention and respect towards local informal economies. Through the JAPs, collective decision-making to set the prices of basic goods in each neighborhood enabled participation in the neighborhood’s material politics. In what is perhaps the darker side to these councils, they also practiced a form of community self-defense, sometimes violently confronting neighbors who were hoarding goods to sell or who were price-gouging the community.
\n\nFacing a new era of institutional change and crisis, we can also learn from what people didn’t do during the crises of the Allende years. The cybernetic project of Cybersyn presented a planned economic solution to production and distribution across territories, and the JAPs presented a model of autonomous and collective resource distribution. Yet there was no alternative project or vision that sought to autonomously link disparate territories to develop alternative logistics outside the economy. Within each JAP, the limit of its power was the limit of what resources could reach the neighborhood’s territory. As a result, it was not only dependent on the central government’s cybernetic project, but also weakened by the same enduring forms of structural violence and economic inequality that create the unequal distribution of resources in the first place.
\n\nToday, we should seek to develop new projects that engender relationships between urban and rural territories and the ways that people and resources flow between them, in order to propose a vision of what it could mean to be autonomous and ungovernable within crisis. It has become obvious that the neoliberal model exacerbates inequality. The socialist response is to ensure that goods are re-distributed to those without previous access. However, this model of re-distribution cannot respond to a crisis of production in which there is a scarcity of goods. The way that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy, causing shortages of key goods like Penicillin and construction materials, shows that our political projects risk irrelevance if they depend on the possibility of returning to capitalist normalcy.
\n\nIn an increasingly volatile world, autonomous groups and social movements can grow if they base their projects on the starting point of scarcity, developing alternative ways to work with people to meet their basic needs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/28/2.jpg\")
\nUnder Syriza, the Greek government left many occupations alone between 2015 and 2018. To some extent, the neighborhood of Exarchia became an unpolicable zone, with riot police keeping their distance and residents generally settling conflicts among themselves. As a consequence, in response to the so-called migrant crisis beginning in 2015, anarchists were able to work with migrants to squat massive buildings to house refugees by the hundred.
\n\nPrevented from using the full extent of their violent capabilities, Greek police settled for pushing anti-social crime and illegal capitalism, especially illegal drug sales and use, into Exarchia, the university campuses, and other spaces of autonomy in hopes of delegitimizing and discrediting them. Alongside right-wing propaganda about Syriza and these autonomous zones (not unlike FOX News coverage of the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in Seattle), this succeeded in providing the New Democracy government with some of its major talking points in preparing for the elections. Syriza had failed to deliver on most of its promises to the public—not least because in a neoliberal global economy, it’s very difficult to protect the citizens of one country without global finance cartels taking their capital elsewhere.
\n\nConsequently, New Democracy won the elections, coming to power on a platform of promising to crush the anarchist, squatting, and refugee solidarity movements by brute force. These movements were not prepared for this—the few years of “breathing room” they had received under Syriza had not expanded their fighting capacities. For the most part, Greek anarchists didn’t associate themselves with Syriza—but they still suffered from the waning of Syriza’s public support.
\n\nArguably, the moral of the story is that it’s dangerous to win gains through any means other than the actual grassroots strength of the movement, as you can misunderstand yourself to be more powerful than you are and, consequently, become the chief target of the state when you are least prepared for it. There’s no substitute for actual social power. If we are thinking in terms of years rather than months, the question is not whether it’s possible to exploit fractures in the state to secure zones of autonomy, but rather, when we do so, how do we prevent our adversaries on the far right from mobilizing against us, specifically? How do we continue to build our capacity to fight, even under left governments—and how do we ensure that popular disillusionment with socialist governments doesn’t enable right-wing forces to seize the state and turn it directly against us, as has occurred in Chile as well as Greece?
\n\nThese are questions we’ll have to address in practice.
\n\nIn 2008, Machi Francisca Linconao submitted an action to the Supreme Court in Chile to stop illegal logging in sacred areas of the Chilean forest where medicinal plants that Mapuche people use can be found. This made her one of the first Indigenous rights defenders in Chile to successfully invoke the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. On January 4, 2013, she was arrested and accused of responsibility for the deaths of Werner Luchsinger and Vivian Mackay. The home in which Luchsinger and Mackay lived had been set alight before dawn by demonstrators commemorating the fifth anniversary of the death of the Mapuche activist, punk, and anarchist Matias Catrileo, who was killed by the Chilean armed forces while participating in a demonstration. In 2018, the Criminal Court of Temuco acquitted Machi Francisca Linconao and eight Mapuche men of all charges relating to the 2013 deaths. ↩
\n