Chile - between Pinochets neoliberal counter-revolution and the 2019-20 anti-neoliberal revolt

Over the last four decades, Chile has experienced the longest economic expansion in its history but also suffered the persistence of high levels of income inequality, precarity, and social dislocation. This chapter contends that narrow interpretations of this apparent good news-bad news paradox, that is, removed from the neoliberal political economy of work which produces it and reproduces it, are not only analytically suspect but also in the service of dominant narratives. As elsewhere, a fundamental goal of Chilean neoliberalism, understood both as theory, ideology and practice of economic policy, and as counter-revolutionary political project, is the thorough domination of capital over labour, clear evidence of which is an industrial relations model purposedly designed to facilitate capital accumulation at the expense of labour by undermining labour’s structural and associational power. The bad news, in other words, has been integral to producing the good news. That workers and their representative organisations have been severely weakened as a result, a fact typically construed by post-industrial perspectives as evidence of an inevitable decline in worker collectivism, does not mean that they have become ineffectual social actors. On the contrary, this chapter argues that workers in general and periphery workers in particular, have long been protagonists of multiple, diverse, and potentially destabilising experiences of organised resistance against recommodification. Though labour’s contribution to the emergence and development of this countermovement for the protection of society has been wide-ranging, this chapter suggests that two areas have been of key significance: the development of transgressive forms of Marx-type resistance at firm and sector level (what we call ‘rupturist’ forms of unionism); and the triggering, catalysing and/or aiding of Polanyi-type struggles by ‘non-class-based’ identity movements with national repercussions.