The Rise of Fascist Formations in Chile and in the World

This essay examines the contemporary crisis in Chile in the context of the rise of the global far right. What led to the popular uprising in Chile in October 2019, and what forces are represented by its violent state repression? Fascist formations are currently developing in various nations; Umberto Eco’s concept of Ur-Fascism is useful in tracing the range of fascisms and their characteristics. These include populism, nationalism, racism, and syncretic traditionalism. In Chile, the racism of the far right is directed against its indigenous people more than immigrants. The ‘unfinished business’ of capitalist development here is the historical background of the oppressive relationship established by the ‘West’ over the ‘Rest’, in Stuart Hall’s terms. Fascism emerges periodically, temporarily resolving crises of accumulation through runaway activity of capital, entailing suppression of the working class and its organization. Neoliberalism has been the latest form of this exacerbation, but as its contradictions have intensified, its ideology no longer manages to mask the exploitation and secure consent. Neoliberalism, trialed in Chile after the 1973 coup under United States hegemony, became globally entrenched following the collapse of Soviet-bloc socialism and the ensuing weaknesses and crises of the organized left and the decay of social democracy. Neoliberal ideology has sustained capital at the same time as neoliberal policies have augmented the precarity of subordinated classes. As this becomes apparent with the sharpening of contradictions, the anachronistic relationship between liberalism and democracy has been deeply damaged. It becomes clear that capital’s profitability is privileged over the needs and wishes of the people. In this framework, to explore the rise and meaning of fascism is thus to examine the condition and possibilities of modernity and its limits. Modernity is besieged by pressurs coming from premodern esentialist conceptions of the world and also by the postmodernist’s view of chaos and fragmentation of a spontaneous social order; neoliberalism becomes compatible with both. Fascism lacks a coherence, but is anchored emotionally to archetypal foundations. Its very eclecticism embraces a wide range of anti-socialist and anti-capitalist discourses, which have enabled it to take root in mass movements. Its ideological resolution of the contradiction between capital and labor is temporary: the intensifying of capital accumulation activates its opposition, to the point where the distorting effect of ideology is unveiled and contradictions appear as class struggle. The longstanding imposition of neoliberalism in Chile, and the runaway activity of capital which it supported have has been rejected and partially defeated by the October 2019 rebellion in Chile. The far right has backed down but has not been defeated. The plebiscite of 25 October 2020 has delivered the people’s verdict on neoliberalism. However, in the different global and national circumstances of 2021, the fascists still among us may yet seek to reassert the order that they sought in 1973.