Natalie Gomez Dunker

In 1974, Scottish workers refused to fix the fighter jets of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. As the West continues to supply Israel with arms, unionized workers could again refuse to stop the flow of weapons of mass murder.

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History is often understood through the stories of “great men,” reflecting capitalism’s encouragement of the individual and suspicion of the collective. Socialists, understandably, have traditionally sought to reject such narratives; a famous example is in the final address of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who, before his death in Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, assured listeners that “history is ours, and the people make history.”

The postindustrial area of Nerston, East Kilbride, echoes this sentiment half a century on. This town on the outskirts of Glasgow is not known for its monuments to famous generals or statesmen; instead, there is a humbler tribute to an alternative history that was, until recently, largely forgotten. In 1974, six months after Pinochet’s coup against Allende’s elected government, three thousand members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) in the Rolls Royce plant in Nerston, led by Communist Party member Bob Fulton, “blacked” a batch of Hawker Hunter jet engines that were to be returned to Chile after repair. Nowhere else were engineers qualified to repair those engines.

At a union branch meeting, the workers had already voted to condemn the coup. “The people being tortured and murdered, they were just like us — trade unionists,” explained Stuart Barrie in a 2018 interview with the Guardian. In the same interview, John Keenan outlined how crucial organization was to AUEW members at Rolls Royce, who had a history of taking political action: “The only reason we could do what we did was because we were organized. We took strike action for the [National Health Service], the Shrewsbury pickets, you name it.”

When the boycott came, it lasted four years, and workers were able to significantly undermine the capacity of the Chilean Air Force. Their action, alongside actions such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)’s members’ refusal to allow a Chilean warship to dock in Oakland, California, became part of a global community of workers whose defiance of tyranny is accredited with the release of tens of thousands from Pinochet’s prison cells and torture chambers.

Today, as we watch on as incomprehensible barbarism is unleashed by the Israeli government against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, much of our response is stifled by illusions of helplessness and despair. The Rolls Royce workers shattered that illusion in 1974 and showed us the best way to combat tyranny, whether in Chile or Palestine: through industrial action in our workplaces.

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Imperialism and the Workplace

In Allende’s final broadcast to the nation, as Pinochet’s Hunter jets rained hell upon the Presidential Palace, he detailed the reality of the coup that had toppled Chilean socialism and outlined the role of imperialism in the assault against democracy:

At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition . . . hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.

Allende was right. It was the United States, fearful of Chile’s reformist program of nationalization and Allende’s firm friendship with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, that orchestrated the coup with the aid of Chile’s ruling elite and its military allies. The imperialist world system — led then, as it is today, by the United States — intrinsically links the source of extraction to the imperial metropole. It was the United States’ interest in exploiting Chilean natural resources that made Allende’s government a target, just as it was Britain’s manufacturing capacity — itself sustained by imperialist exploitation — that brought Chilean-owned jets to the workshops of East Kilbride.

If these links are the source of imperial power, then the ability of workers to undermine them in their workplaces is also a major pressure point. The action taken by Fulton and his comrades illuminated the tangible impact workers in the imperial core could have on the lives of those in the Global South.

Today, we can also contextualize our own workplaces in the imperialist system and pinpoint its weaknesses. This is critical to building a more effective, dynamic movement for Palestinian liberation in Britain. Israel — itself a heavily militarized outpost of US imperialism — is fundamentally tied to the Western economies that keep it afloat. By understanding those ties in our own workplaces, we can begin to organize workers in the same vein as Fulton and his comrades.

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Workers Against Genocide

Today, Scotland’s industrial base is comprised in large part by weapons manufacturers. The work of groups like Palestine Action and Workers for a Free Palestine in shutting down these factories should be applauded, but we must also ask what comes next.  The 1974 Rolls Royce boycott lasted four years — considerably longer than any direct action, and with the collective power to protect workers from the state repression we see now.  Sustainability is a principle from 1974 that we must carry forward to inform our strategy today.

At present, our tactics disrupt the running of weapons plants short-term, without the support or endorsement of the workers inside. To develop a movement of workers that is truly anti-imperialist, we must build in stages and engage proactively with workers in weapons factories, with the aim of organizing sustainable, long-term boycotts inside these factories themselves. Building inside weapons manufacturing facilities like BAE and Thales in tandem with a wider drive to organize Scottish workplaces around cultural and economic boycotts of apartheid Israel has the potential not only to bolster our campaigning on Palestinian liberation, but also to strengthen our movement industrially and reestablish its foundations.

The British trade union movement is still traumatized by the shattering defeats of the Margaret Thatcher era. Timid ideas of service-model trade unionism have grown alongside a reluctance to branch into the political sphere beyond the parameters set by the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Thatcher’s victory over organized labor was embellished with a wave of legislation that has hampered the ability of unions to politically intervene, with the threat of financial and legal reprisals often hanging over them.

Lay-members must consider an organized offensive against this repression as a critical factor in workplace organizing around Palestine and beyond. The broad public support for an immediate cease-fire in Palestine should provide trade unionists across the British economy with fertile ground upon which to nurture a politicized trade unionism that can raise British workers’ empathetic response toward Palestine into a political one that engages people in their daily lives.

Elsewhere in Scotland, workers are already showing the potential of their power. Unite Hospitality’s Glasgow branch has recently launched the “Serve Solidarity” campaign, which is organizing worker-led boycotts of apartheid produce in the city’s social and cultural spaces. The successful campaign by workers at the Stand Comedy Club has led to the boycott’s enforcement in all three venues. From Belgium to South Africa and India, transport workers’ unions have refused to touch arms shipments destined to Israel, while garment workers in Kerala will no longer make Israeli police uniforms.

The proximity of these industries to imperialism, and Israel in particular, will naturally vary. What is key is their contribution to a wider global movement taking sustained, material action to halt the ongoing genocide. Leonardo Cáceres, a radio broadcaster on the day of Pinochet’s coup, said in an interview for the 2018 documentary Nae Pasaran that, although the Rolls Royce trade unionists might have seen their gesture as “something small,” it was in fact extremely valuable: “They proved to the dictators in Chile that despite the support of certain governments, their actions were condemned by the majority of human beings.”

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Rebuilding Internationalism

What Fulton and his comrades at Rolls Royce were able to demonstrate was not solely the collective power of workers in the international arena, but also that the workplace is a weakness of the imperialist world system. They proved to the world that acts of defiance can undermine a seemingly insurmountable enemy, while illuminating the material relationships that link workers and their interests everywhere.

When the workers of Rolls Royce extended the hand of solidarity from East Kilbride to Santiago, it removed fascist planes from the sky. Our movement must now do the same for the people of Palestine and use our own hand of solidarity to shatter the reactionary, insular ideas that have seen our movement become weak and disorganized, and redirect it toward being a force that can challenge imperialism and change the world.

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Award-winning performer Holly Herndon is using artificial intelligence to pioneer novel forms of composition, pushing back against AI-generated music that produces an endless glut of the same instead of anything radically new.

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There’s a moment, about five minutes in to one of the most recent episodes of the podcast Interdependence, when the usual banter is brushed aside and the real stakes of the conversation become clear. “People are still talking about music,” cohost Mat Dryhurst says, “as if the world hasn’t changed significantly.”

For some years now, there have been few surer guides to the significance of that change than Dryhurst and his partner, the award-winning performer and composer Holly Herndon. Ever since 2020, Herndon and Dryhurst have uploaded new episodes of Interdependence once every week or so, featuring conversations with the likes of artificial intelligence (AI) researcher François Pachet, performance artist Marina Abramović and Taiwan’s inaugural minister of digital affairs, Audrey Tang.  At times, the couple seem to be so far ahead of the curve that a note of frustration creeps into their voices at the rest of the world’s failure to see just how far the social and technological goalposts have shifted.

I first interviewed Herndon and Dryhurst back in 2013, at the time of her album Movement. At that time, other than as a tool for “smashing things together” and creating subtly shifting “textural elements,” artificial intelligence–type tools were not playing “a huge part” in Herndon’s music, she told me. But in the years since, the technology has moved fast. In November 2018, just as new kinds of large language models were being invented by corporations like Google and OpenAI, Herndon posted on Twitter: “AI is a deceptive, over abused term. Collective Intelligence (CI) is more useful. It’s often just us (our labor/data), in aggregate, harnessed to produce value by a few, who maybe have an easier time acting with impunity because we are distracted by fairytales about sentient robots.” Less than a week later, she released the first video from her third album Proto, a record which tackled these issues head-on.

The impetus for the project came from an unusual place. After years touring a solo laptop set, Herndon felt an urge to sing with other people again. Growing up in Johnson City, Tennessee, Herndon sang in church choirs and now found she “missed the joy of singing with other people as well as the joy of the audience feeling it,” as she put it in a January 2020 interview. At the same time, she and Dryhurst are both self-confessed “nerds interested in nerdy topics.” Stuff happening with large language models and deep learning was too tempting to resist. AI programs tend to be built on vast datasets, usually scraped off the words, images, and sounds that millions of people all over the world have posted on the internet, which are then used to train algorithmic systems to produce new content that mimics whatever it’s been trained on, creating a kind of aggregate of a huge wealth of human thought. But Herndon is not interested in reproducing other people’s ideas, and is too conscientious to appropriate other people’s data without their consent, as the big software companies do.

Using a powerful gaming computer, Herndon started building up her own dataset based on her own voice, her partner’s voice, and contributions from an additional vocal ensemble of fourteen other close friends, all of whom were properly credited and compensated for their contributions. The resulting program, Dryhurst and Herndon’s “AI Baby,” was christened Spawn, and regarded during the album’s recording process not simply as a generator of content but a collaborator with the more fleshy participants. Sounds and compositional ideas flowed back and forth between human and machine, getting stranger and stranger at each step of the process. The end results are utterly beguiling, like medieval plainsong beamed down from another planet, with the lines between organic and digital blurred to the point of total indistinction.

Proto is an object lesson in the potential aesthetic benefits that can come from working with machine learning systems. It’s also a first step in thinking through the ethical minefield that such systems represent. To a rising tide of “deepfake” songs, in which artists like Travis Scott and Kanye West are digitally reconfigured to voice lyrics they never uttered in styles they’ve employed, Herndon’s objection is twofold: on the one hand, it’s extractive. Such practices profit from other people’s labor without their consent. On the other hand, it’s dull, producing an endless glut of the same instead of anything radically new.

Herndon and Dryhurst’s approach suggests another way is possible. They don’t have all the answers yet, but the point of their Interdependence podcast is to at least initiate a series of conversations that might start to grope toward it. As Herndon herself said in an interview with the Guardian in May 2019, “We haven’t yet figured out how to deal with intellectual property [in pre-digital music] and AI is like if a sample could sprout legs and run. It is recording technology 2.0, and we don’t have an ethical framework.”

As major record labels like Warner Records are already investing in systems like Endel, an app for generating an endless grey goo of “personalized sound environments,” it might be worth paying attention to the fruits of a more artist-led approach to the immense wealth of our own human collective intelligence.

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When Germany pledged to oppose South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the Namibian government reminded German politicians of their state’s genocidal record in Africa. Rosa Luxemburg exposed the crimes of German colonialism while they were happening.

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The Namibian government issued one of the most striking expressions of solidarity with Palestinians facing the blows of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza on January 13, in support of South Africa’s case bringing the charge of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice. It issued the following statement in response to the German government’s decision to officially support Israel’s denial of these charges:

Namibia rejects Germany’s support of the genocidal intent of the racist Israeli state against innocent civilians in Gaza. Germany committed the first genocide of the twentieth century in 1904–1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions . . . President [Hage] Geingob appeals to the German Government to reconsider its untimely decision to intervene as a third-party in defense and support of the genocidal acts of Israel before the International Court of Justice.

It is surely a remarkable act of bad faith for Germany to defend Israel’s actions when it has yet to fully account for its own genocidal acts against the Nama and Herero peoples of what is now Namibia. The German state has never agreed to provide financial compensation or reparations for the descendants of its victims.

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Genocide in Namibia

Germany began to take control of Southwest Africa in 1884, shortly after the Berlin Conference divided Africa between an array of European powers, with the active support of the United States. It dispossessed Africans of their land, forced them into reservations and concentration camps, and subjected many to slave labor.

The German state has never agreed to provide financial compensation or reparations for the descendants of its victims in Namibia.

In 1903, the Nama revolted against the German occupation, joined not long afterward by the Herero, in 1904. Germany responded with unprecedented violence: General Lothar von Trotha, an archmilitarist who had helped suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, was given a free hand to crush the rebellion. Trotha declared:

I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country . . . the constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of this nation and destroy them gradually.

After defeating the rebels in battle, he proceeded to drive their entire communities — men, women, and children — into the Kalahari Desert, where most died of thirst, illness, or starvation. The genocidal intent was unmistakable in von Trotha‘s proclamation:

Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them.

About one hundred thousand Nama and Herero — 85 percent of their total population — died as a result.

Hailed for his actions by the German kaiser, Trotha became a leading figure in the racist, far-right Thule Society following his return to Germany. In this role he served as an inspiration to the young Adolf Hitler. It was surely no accident that Hitler later declared, upon launching his invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, “Russia is our Africa and the Russians are our Africans.”

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Luxemburg on Imperialism

The Namibian government’s strident retort to the German government recalls the powerful indictment of German imperialism at the time by Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish Jewish revolutionary socialist. From the start of her work as an activist and theorist, Luxemburg castigated the genocidal implications of European and American capital’s intrusion into the non-Western world — including in Africa, a part of the world that many Western socialists paid scant attention to at the time.

As Luxemburg wrote in her Introduction to Political Economy (1909–15):

For peoples in colonized territories, the transition from primitive communist conditions to modern capitalist ones always takes place as a sudden catastrophe, an unforeseeable misfortune with the most frightful sufferings, as it is presently true of the Germans with Negroes of Southwest Africa.

She extended this critique in her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, when discussing the Boer War between the white Afrikaner settlers and British government in South Africa. Luxemburg noted that the “tiny peasant republics” of the Boers were engaged in “a constant guerrilla war with the Bantu-speaking Africans”:

The peasant economy and the colonial policy of large-scale capital engaged each other in a competitive struggle over the Khoikoi and other indigenous peoples — i.e. over their land and their labor power. The goal of both competitors was exactly the same: to crush, drive out, or exterminate Black Africans, to destroy their forms of social organization, to appropriate their land, and to compel them to work in conditions of exploitation.

She singled out Germany’s crimes against the Nama and Herero as they were occurring. Consider the following passage from her 1904 article “The Russian Terrorist Trial”:

Our Privy Councilors know only too well how to hound the African Hereros and the “pig-tailed Chinese,” calling for “revenge campaigns” for the death of every German colonial adventurer to be “atoned” by not one but by thousands of foreign lives. They understand their screams for revenge as being for “German honor,” as soon as someone in Honolulu or Patagonia dares as much as look at the Germans disapprovingly.

Luxemburg developed this point further in her essay “Proletarian Women” (1912):

The workshop of the future requires many hands and hearts. A world of female misery is waiting for relief. The wife of the peasant moans as she nearly collapses under life’s burdens. In German Africa, in the Kalahari Desert, the bones of defenseless Herero women are bleaching in the sun, hunted down by a band of German soldiers and subjected to a horrific death of hunger and thirst. On the other side of the ocean, in the high cliffs of Putumayo, the death cries of martyred Indian women, ignored by the world, fade away in the rubber plantations of the international capitalists.

Three years later, she again recalled the litany of colonial crimes in her famous Junius Pamphlet:

The present world war is a turning point in the course of imperialism . . . The “civilized world” that has stood calmly by when this same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction; when the desert of Kalahari shuddered with the insane cry of the thirsty and the rattling breath of the dying . . . when in Tripoli the Arabs were mowed down, with fire and swords, under the yoke of capital while their civilization and their homes were razed to the ground.

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Rediscovering Luxemburg

Luxemburg’s strident criticism of German imperialism’s crimes against the indigenous peoples of Southwest Africa has long been widely known. However, it has only recently emerged that she penned a series of twice-weekly analyses and reports on the Nama and Herero revolt in 1904, in the Polish-language newspaper Gazeta Ludowa.

Gazeta Lodowa was published in Poznań, a predominantly Polish-speaking region that was annexed to the Prussian Empire during the second partition of Poland in 1793. The publication was sponsored by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) rather than Luxemburg’s Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, which operated in Russian-occupied Poland.

As part of an effort to show skeptical SPD officials that she could win Polish workers in Poznań and other parts of German-occupied Poland to the cause of socialism, Luxemburg became the newspaper’s editor from July 1902 to June 1904. While many of the issues of 1902 and 1903 have not been found, all of those from 1904 have been. The newspaper was discontinued in July 1904 after the arrest and execution of Luxemburg’s close comrade and friend, Marcin Kasprzak (her main organizer in Poznań), and her own three-month prison sentence later in 1904.

All of Luxemburg’s articles in Gazeta Ludowa were published anonymously. They covered a wide range of issues, from political developments in Germany to the oppression of Poles by German settlers who were seeking to “cleanse” parts of Silesia and South Prussia of Poles, as well as various events taking place overseas. In 1962, Polish labor historian Felix Tych identified her as the author of twenty-seven articles in Gazeta Ludowa.

Luxemburg clearly wanted the Polish proletarians to know what was happening in Southwest Africa and extend solidarity with African victims of German oppression. 

However, these writings of hers were completely ignored. They were never reproduced in Polish or included in her German-language Collected Works, and they remained totally unknown in the English-speaking world. Thanks to the prodigious research of Jörn Schütrumpf, it was recently discovered that Luxemburg herself wrote virtually every article from 1904 in this four-page newspaper.

Moreover, almost every issue contained articles and reports by her on events in Africa — mostly about the resistance of the Nama and Herero to Germany’s genocide. She clearly wanted the Polish proletarians to know what was happening in Southwest Africa and extend solidarity with African victims of German oppression.

Some of Luxemburg’s writings in Gazeta Ludowa have recently appeared for the first time in German translation in a collection edited by Holger Politt. All of Luxemburg’s writings in the Gazeta Ludowa, totaling several hundred pages, will appear in a forthcoming volume of the English-language Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

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The Civilization of Capital

Luxemburg had a lot on her plate in 1904. She was a prolific writer for the German socialist press who was intensively engaged in theoretical and political debates in the SPD and the Socialist International, as well as working tirelessly to campaign for SPD candidates while running her underground party in Poland (along with her colleague Leo Jogiches). That is without even counting her voluminous correspondence.

Rosa Luxemburg was a true internationalist and anti-imperialist, and most of all a humanist.

It is hard to imagine how she found time to write virtually the entire content of a twice-weekly newspaper in what was then a rather modest-sized provincial city of 120,000 — it turned out that she had fewer supporters in Poznań than she let on to the SPD. And yet she still managed to handle this added commitment.

So what exactly did Luxemburg have to say about events in Africa in 1904? In January of that year, she highlighted the depredations of Belgian king Leopold II in the Congo:

An English priest, a missionary, describes the atrocities of the Belgians towards the Blacks in the Belgian colony of Congo as follows: In Mbongo, a Belgian village in Congo, a rubber warehouse has been set up where the local population can harvest the rubber tree must be added as tax. If the Black man doesn’t bring enough rubber, the lightest punishment that awaits him is a lash. Black people are often shot on the spot for such offenses as a deterrent example so that “the others are more diligent.”

It also happens that the Belgians, to save ammunition, have the Blacks line up one behind the other in a row so that they can kill several people with just one bullet as it penetrates one body after the other. At another Belgian station, the missionary saw human skeletons scattered in the grass; he counted 36 skulls. When he asked where the bones came from, he was told that they were Black people shot by Belgian soldiers, and that their relatives were forbidden to bury them. It is safe to assume that these beasts in human form, who commit elaborate murder for the sake of mammon, will still utter comments about the “immorality of socialists.”

Responding to the pardoning of Prince Prosper von Arenberg, a German military officer who brutally tortured and murdered a defenseless African, she wrote the following in February 1904:

It makes your hair stand on end when you read about such murder and it’s hard to believe that the beast capable of such abomination is a normal human being. And yet both the trial and its outcome raise many probing and troubling questions. First of all, how many convicted murderers may there be who, like Prince Arenberg, are mentally ill and yet were calmly sent to the scaffold or to prison? We Social Democrats are decidedly against the death penalty, and against penitentiaries in general; we do not believe that a prison could reform any criminal. In any case, we ask: if the roles had been reversed, that is, if the unfortunate Black had murdered Prince Arenberg, would public opinion have taken so much trouble to investigate his mental state?

She went on to raise “the most important question” arising from Arenberg’s case:

What should we think of a colonial policy that results in insane and degenerate criminals gaining such limitless power over the life and death of the unfortunate population in the colonies? Is it any wonder that the Herero people would now rather die than continue to recognize the dominance of German “culture,” which is represented by such beasts as [Carl] Peters, [Karl] Wehlan, [Heinrich] Leist and Prince von Arenberg?

Also in February 1904, Luxemburg returned to the subject of the Congo and the exposure of Leopold’s atrocities by Roger Casement, who went on take part in Ireland’s Easter Rising twelve years later:

The English government’s report was recently presented on the prevailing conditions in the African state of Congo, which is a Belgian colony. The report contains the eyewitness account of the English consul Casement, who examined the area on a special trip. The consul reports that the open slave trade has disappeared in Congo (so it existed before, and it is still practiced to some extent!), but forced labor now exists.

But the “forced labor” of the Blacks means nothing less than de facto slavery, of which the rapporteur himself gives the best information when he describes how Belgian officials throw women into prison just to force their husbands to work, or when he describes the torture against Blacks and other horrors committed by the colonial soldiers. The English press is extremely outraged by the inhumanity of the Belgians but forgets that the English in their colonies are no better at dealing with the so-called “semi-savage tribes” when they spread the “civilization” of capital through robbery, killing and torture.

In April, Luxemburg discussed the link between capitalism and colonial expansion:

While the whole world is glued to the bloody struggle between Russia and Japan over a large piece of mainland Asia, behind their backs the African earth has been quietly and secretly divided up! Such is the bloody path with which capitalism circles the globe! But the faster it races, consumed by greedy robbery, the faster it reaches its goal — its end. Despite its bloody course, the socialist movement presses like an inseparable shadow in the wake of the robbery and exploitation of capitalism. Where capitalism paves the way today through deserts, mountains and oceans, there we will one day stand the enlightened people who have liberated work, liberated peoples, fraternized humanity, driven out suffering and oppression. And to the Blacks in the African deserts, who are now divided like a herd of cattle between two rapacious powers, international, victorious socialism will one day bring the gospel of freedom, equality, and fraternity!

Another article from the same month connected German colonial atrocities in Africa to servile, authoritarian militarism on the home front:

The Germans order Blacks to be hunted to take away their soil and honor, after which their freedom, peace and livelihood are taken away. The farmers and workers from Pomerania, from Posen, from Bavaria, to whom no Black person has ever done anything bad, are now hunting down the poor Black people somewhere in the sandy desert of Africa, murdering, robbing, and raping the women. Will at least one of them do this on their own initiative and with deliberation? No, iron military discipline alone turns the soldier into an animal, a fratricide, a murderer in war. First, he is mistreated, humiliated, and dishonored in the barracks for two years, and then he is let loose on others like a trained dog.

Luxemburg continued to develop the point:

The crimes of today’s militarism are as closely tied as links in a chain. The mistreatment of soldiers in peacetime, the war crimes, the politics of military conquest — these are all just flowers and fruits of a single branch, of militarism, which grows on a single bush, that of the capitalist economy.

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New Passions, New Forces

It is hard to read these passages and not be struck by how much they speak to the horrors being visited upon those suffering from neocolonialism and imperialism today — whether it be in Palestine, Ukraine, or Amazonia. Then as now, this oppression is the “flower and fruit of a single branch” — a global capitalist system in total disarray. Clearly, Rosa Luxemburg was a true internationalist and anti-imperialist, and most of all a humanist, who had no illusions that the struggle against imperialism could succeed if it was confined to acts of vengeance and terrorism.

As she argued during the 1905 Russian Revolution, “the thirst for vengeance invariably awakens vague hopes and expectations” and “weakens the clear understanding of the absolute necessity for, and the exceptionally decisive importance of, a mass movement among the people, a mass revolution of the proletariat” for the destruction of capitalism and imperialism. The massive outpouring of protests in solidarity with Palestine and against Israel’s genocide points to the emergence of precisely the kind of new passions and new forces that can make this perspective a reality for today.

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We’re living in an era of crisis. Enter lifestyle fascism: a bid to remake society by remaking the beleaguered male body.

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The first thing to know about Bryan Johnson is that there are two of him. One is Bryan with a “y,” the forty-six-year-old founder of the Blueprint life-extension system. This Bryan Johnson spends his days submitting to full-body scans, blood tests, and something called “penis rejuvenation” in search of physical immortality. The other is Brian with an “i,” a forty-five-year-old influencer known as “Liver King” who advocates an “ancestral lifestyle” allegedly unavailable to modern humans due to our penchant for living indoors, staring at our computers, and cooking our food.

On the surface, the two Johnsons seem totally opposed. Bryan is a vegan who subsists on custom-made vegetable goos and avoids sunlight, while Brian eats a pound of raw liver every day and sports a deeply bronzed physique. Bryan, a tech centimillionaire who made his fortune on payment-processing apps, telegraphs introspection and asceticism — at least, when he is not posting about injecting his penis with vasodilators. Brian, who used to work in his wife’s dental practice, is a self-described “dominant man” who perches on a plush throne and gleefully chows down on raw organ meats, often in staged family meals featuring his obviously reluctant children.

Whereas Brian seeks to recapture man’s lost prehistoric grandeur through pull-ups and squats, Bryan prepares his flesh vessel for an AI-mediated technofuture. Yet their distinct views of exercise, nutrition, and even time itself contribute to one and the same political project. Drawing on American individualism, Silicon Valley’s quenchless thirst for “optimization,” and the self-help platitudes of a hippie culture that curdled in the late 1970s and ’80s, the Johnsons and their ilk help constitute a right-wing politics I call “lifestyle fascism.”

Unlike influencers in the so-called “wellness-to-fascism” pipeline, the Johnsons do not exploit skepticism toward mainstream health expertise to prime their audiences for right-wing talking points. Instead, they start with a fascist aesthetic tradition that prizes hard young bodies and fuse it with the language of self-help culture, promising potential followers eternal life among a cadre of superior male specimens. The only criterion for participation is a willingness to take one’s destiny into one’s own hands and sign up while supplies last. The monetization of their worldviews through the sale of raw-liver supplements or $75 bottles of extra-virgin olive oil further domesticates their Nietzscheanism.

The Johnsons’ projects dovetail with a defining characteristic of American capitalism since Ronald Reagan: the systematic platforming of grifters. Like many other wellness influencers, the two men tout idealized lifestyles while strategically omitting their inaccessibility to the average mortal. In December 2022, for instance, it transpired that Liver King was downing nearly $12,000 of steroids per month, undermining his claim that he had achieved sculpted abs through “ancestral” eating and exercise alone. Meanwhile, Bryan Johnson refuses to disclose the purportedly “scientific” underpinnings of his Blueprint methodology, even to doctors and scientists wishing to collaborate with him. In any case, with its $2 million a year price tag, Blueprint as Bryan Johnson experiences it is available only to a select few.

The overlap between the Johnsons thus transcends their superficial differences. Their bids to remake society by remaking the beleaguered male body capitalize on the enduring popularity of self-improvement schemes while signaling unmistakably right-wing views. Both Johnsons believe that any problems in a person’s life proceed from individual choices. Fix your diet, workout patterns, and sleep schedule, they claim, and you will conquer your worst impulses, live virtually forever, and break with the toxic aspects of modernity — no solidarity or institutional change required. Both attach a clear moral valuation to the lifestyle they see as optimal while tarring their former selves — and, by extension, anyone living contrary to their teachings — as inferior. Bryan Johnson refers to his pre-Blueprint mindset as “rascal brain.” As far as Liver King is concerned, “Brian Johnson” no longer exists because his alter ego “ripped open a cage and ate” him.

Without ever calling themselves Übermenschen or decrying modern ways of living as “degenerate,” the Johnsons slot their intention to recover a lost golden age (Brian) or attain futuristic utopia (Bryan) among myriad online wellness trends. Against this background, their contributions to right-wing masculinist discourse seem almost incidental. It is true that Liver King proscribes the consumption of seed oils as one of his “ancestral tenets,” and that programmatic opposition to seed oils correlates with conspiratorial right-wing thinking.

Similarly, Bryan Johnson’s belief in the life-extending power of blood transfusions aligns him with technofascists like Peter Thiel, but, on its own, proves nothing about his political views. It is no coincidence, however, that once someone has “collected them all” from a specific set of personal commitments — paranoia about seed oils; rejection of vaccines; a belief that biohacking or “data” or artificial intelligence can make humans physically immortal; a nostalgia for “traditional” foods or gender relations — we can pretty much predict which political forms they will favor.

In a world of fraying metanarratives, fragmented sociality, and rule by unaccountable oligarchy, the only remaining choices seem to be consumer ones. In the Bill Clinton era, triangulation and focus grouping accelerated the commodification of politics, transforming candidates into products and voting decisions into lifestyle choices. Since the advent of social media, which has monetized extreme content and siloed users into filter bubbles, politics and lifestyle have drawn even closer together. Not only have political decisions become matters of lifestyle, lifestyle choices accumulate into ideology.

If in Walter Benjamin’s day, fascism was aestheticizing politics, contemporary fascism has lifestylized it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of wellness, where the individualistic drive for self-improvement easily shades into condemnation of the suboptimal, the enfeebled, the inherently unworthy.

Like the deranged newscaster in the 1976 media satire Network, the Johnsons are “mad as hell” at modern life and unwilling to “take it anymore.” Couched in the boosterish language of the online wellness guru, their projects link perfecting the physical self to building a better future for white men and those who love them. The “robust energy and biological resilience” of Liver King’s “ancestral lifestyle” is fueled by patriarchal values as much as by raw liver. Bryan Johnson writes that although his Blueprint methodology “may seem” like it’s “about health, wellness and aging,” it’s actually “a system to make tomorrow better for you, me, the planet and our shared future with AI.”

Acolytes of these approaches need not travel the “wellness-to-fascism” pipeline that starts with vaccine skepticism and ends with QAnon or Alex Jones. In the case of the two Johnsons, the call is coming from inside the house. The fascism is already in the lifestyle.

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By the time Chile’s workers rose up to rally around Salvador Allende, Latin America had become a key arena in US planners’ “mortal struggle to determine the shape of the future world.” Henry Kissinger was obsessed with toppling the socialist president.

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In late winter of 1971, six months after the election of Allende and the Popular Unity (UP) coalition led by the Communist and Socialist parties, Nixon extolled America’s defense of democracy and self-determination. He gravely proclaimed to Chile’s ambassador that “[t]he path represented by the program of your government is not the path chosen by the people of this country, but we recognize the right of any country to order its affairs.” Not to be outdone, Kissinger explained that the US government “did not wish in any way to interfere with the internal affairs of Chile,” adding that the country’s unprecedented reform process was “worthy of great admiration.”

Even by the standards of American policymakers’ duplicity, Kissinger’s cynicism stands out. As is well known, and was understood at the time, immediately after Allende won the presidency and inaugurated the Chilean road to socialism, US elites began a campaign to make the underdeveloped country’s economy “scream.” Kissinger-the-realist simply refused to idly “watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” But even the northern giant could not remake Chilean history just as it pleased.

US meddling in Chilean politics was not new. In 1948, Washington’s influence had contributed to the liberal president Gabriel González Videla’s decision to turn on his Popular Front allies and persecute Communists. On that occasion, prominent militant Pablo Neruda, the Nobel prize-winning poet, was lucky enough to save himself after a dangerous escape across the Andes.

A quarter century later, the United States again flexed its muscle to rein in the region. Kissinger led the campaign to crush Allende’s democratic strategy for radical reform. Efforts to defeat the UP culminated in the September 11, 1973, coup, which ushered in human and social catastrophes that few, even among the coup plotters, could have imagined. Allende and Neruda would not survive. Nor would the thousands of workers and activists who were assassinated or disappeared by Pinochet’s regime of terror.

Kissinger’s obsession with toppling Allende was not driven by an unreflecting defense of US corporate interests. After all, Washington had learned to accept nationalizations throughout the region, and after the coup that toppled the UP government, the largest expropriated mining interests remained under Chilean state control. Nor did his preoccupation stem from fears over Soviet or Cuban expansionism. Following the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviets ceded Latin America as an unchallenged sphere of US influence; indeed, throughout the Allende years, as Kissinger and the US foreign policy establishment knew, Moscow was not going to let Chile’s road to socialism spoil its détente with the United States.

Kissinger mapped out a strategy to bring down the UP because Allende’s policies and the movements behind them posed a threat to US domination of Latin America. As the region was in upheaval, with all stripes of nationalists, populists, and radicals challenging the US-led order, American elites did not hesitate to brandish the full array of aggression — whether open or covert, partisan or economic, civilian or military — to topple democratically elected leaders, support dictators, and facilitate mass state terrorism. And while it is most likely that the coup and the slaughter it ushered in would have occurred without US intervention, Kissinger’s actions to destroy Chile’s democratic revolution are revealing.

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The Bloody Tracks of Chilean Socialism

By the time Chile’s workers and peasants rose to stare down local elites and the hegemon to the north, Latin America, in the eyes of US global planners, had become a decisive arena in the “mortal struggle to determine the shape of the future world.” Globally, American postwar foreign policy consisted of an expansionist push sold as Soviet containment. In the western hemisphere there was something genuine about containment, but it had little to do with Soviet meddling. Instead, new homegrown challenges to US dominance had to be suppressed.

Following the Cuban Revolution, and particularly after the failure of the Alliance for Progress, sovereign development models featuring profound reforms began challenging the US-led regional capitalist order. Allende and the UP represented the most radical of the proliferating threats. Washington intervened to preserve a commercial system that organized markets, capital flows, resources, and political forces into an arrangement that sustained US supremacy. But growing industry gave workers’ movements expanding organizational capacities, which took on unpredictable militancy and autonomy.

Allende had come dangerously close to winning the presidency in 1958, a mere decade after the Videla administration betrayed radicals and labor. With elites divided between two candidates, his new communist-socialist front lost the plurality by less than three percentage points. Six years later, as the workers’, student, shanty, and peasant movements surged, business parties came together to back the third-way capitalist program of the Christian Democrats; with reluctant support of the traditional landed and conservative elites, Eduardo Frei Montalva’s modernizing “revolution in liberty” campaign handily won the popular vote, 56 percent to 39 percent.

Yet even against a unified business class, the shortcomings of capitalist development propelled the rise of workers’ parties. In the pivotal 1970 elections, after Frei’s policies — which included substantial land reform, labor protections, and increased national participation in mining — went too far for capitalists yet not nearly far enough for the working poor, the UP surprisingly came out ahead of the split Christian–Democratic (CD) and oligarchic National Party candidates, with a 36 percent plurality.

The national security advisor and his boss could not contain their rage. No longer was Chile the harmless “dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica” in the irrelevant “southern portion of the world from the Pyrenees on down,” that Kissinger had dismissed. Chile acquired unparalleled strategic primacy. As a national security memo requested by Kissinger himself elaborated, this was not due to any “vital national [economic] interests within Chile.” Nor, as the same memo concluded, was it driven by fears that “the world military balance of power would … be significantly altered by an Allende government.”

The problem was the volatile grassroots militancy behind the UP. Reasserting American domination in Chile involved not only dealing with Allende and the UP on diplomatic and institutional levels; bringing the country back into the fold of inter–American capitalism then meant confronting a particularly independent and mobilized working class. With Washington facing concurrent nationalist challenges in the region, Kissinger was determined to squash the Chilean democratic revolution, lest the dogged radicalism of the country’s powerless classes resonate across its borders. But he did not enjoy a completely free hand. For three years, Kissinger’s interventionism was conditioned by tensions between the popular agitation to shape and deepen Allende’s reforms and UP’s politicians, who favored a measured and negotiated approach.

Kissinger’s brightest contrivance was to preempt Allende’s inauguration in order to avoid a clash between popular Chilean aspirations and Washington’s designs for the region. With the NSC’s approval, the CIA funneled money into the CD campaign, hoping that, despite business fractures, public opinion could be frightened away from looming Bolshevik totalitarianism. The $2.6 million pumped into the elections proved useless, though, so the State Department and the NSC turned to more sinister tactics. At the urging of top Chilean business leaders, Nixon and Kissinger, removing all restraint on covert US involvement, approved the CIA’s “firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup.” Efforts to topple Allende would be ongoing if necessary, but “it would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to the 24 October … utilizing every appropriate resource … implemented clandestinely and securely so that USG and American hand be well hidden.” Kissinger thus set in motion two strategies to impede Allende from assuming office.

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Subversion, Sabotage and Sedition

The embarrassing failure to block Allende’s inauguration gave the UP political and programmatic room to maneuver. American covert incompetence had forced Nixon and Kissinger into resuming a cooperative public stance, the latter reassuring ambassador Orlando Letelier — a close Allende advisor who, six years later, was blown to pieces on the streets of Washington, DC in a Condor terror network car bombing — that the United States desired coexistence. With the United States bogged down in the taxing Indochinese conflict and regional challenges emerging in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru, Allende confidently pursued socialist reforms and expanded his support base.

His first order of policy was to nationalize the country’s mines. Much like a petro-state, Chile is totally dependent on copper. At the time, Chilean copper supplied roughly one- seventh of global production, and by 1970 accounted for over three-quarters of the country’s export earnings. Most production was in the hands of transnationals, which made a killing avoiding taxes. Since Frei’s reforms had failed to put the resource to use for national development and well-being, the UP enjoyed a broad consensus in favor of nationalization. But substantial changes to the copper industry could jolt the structure of US-led regional capitalism.

Unable to prevent nationalization of the mines and later stung by Santiago’s influential diplomatic stroke in reestablishing ties with Havana, Washington was determined to impede any further successes. Having extended his time frame for toppling Allende, Kissinger set in motion three strands of destabilization: secret support for the anti-UP opposition, economic strangulation, and infiltration of the armed forces.

As Nixon smoldered for having to momentarily accommodate those “ingrate Latins,” Kissinger funneled more cash into the opposition’s upcoming electoral campaigns to reverse Allende’s initial triumphs. The State Department and the CIA understood that business elites remained reluctant to pump money into the fractured opposition, but by helping to produce a solid showing of the center and right parties in the 1971 local elections, Kissinger aimed to nurture a domestic political force that would take the lead in subverting democracy.

He was disappointed. Allende’s coalition increased its backing to almost 50 percent, consolidating popular support for the Chilean road to socialism. The time had come for the NSC to take the gloves off and deploy more reliable methods. The State Department decided to intensify its unspoken blockade of the gaunt southern country while simultaneously deepening its influence among Chile’s armed forces. The former would be accomplished by choking Santiago’s access to multilateral credits, loans and trade preferences. The latter consisted of consolidating conspiratorial networks and, through generous materiel and funding packages, generating dependence on US foreign policy planners.

Growing mobilization and radicalization, however, shielded Allende from the mounting offensive. Not only was the UP able to handily achieve copper expropriation, which even the far right did not dare oppose, it also redistributed national income heavily toward the working class, intensified land reform, and placed key areas of production and distribution under state and popular control. Strong grassroots approval and organization gave the president the confidence to adopt in September 1971 a compensation formula for expropriated mines. By calculating repayment according to excess profit assessments, it concluded that copper giants Kennecott and Anaconda actually owed Chileans!

Chile’s popular militants and movements had met the imperialist onslaught with effective resolve. In the regional arena, a surging Allende was anything but bashful. Taking note of Nixon’s China rapprochement and Soviet détente, the Chilean president and his advisors, though skeptical of public American amenability, successfully lobbied to host the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Allende spent months rallying the Global South to join Chile in rejecting US “diktats” and forging an independent and progressive development course.

Eventually, Kissinger’s machinations to sabotage the economy and sow instability and treason began burrowing beneath the UP’s favorable balance of forces. At the end of 1971, while the Treasury Department conveyed the rage of expropriated transnationals (and those fearing similar losses) and pushed Nixon to adopt a uniformly punitive policy, Kissinger continued to urge caution. But his trepidation had nothing to do with actual “realist” accommodation. He simply feared that open retaliation against Third World nationalists would aggravate widespread global anti-Americanism.

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Disappearing the Workers’ March

The UP entered 1973 in deep trouble. Industrial output had contracted and foodstuffs had shrunk by a quarter. With a trade deficit ballooning to almost $450 million, Washington’s credit blockade made it impossible for Allende to close the gap. Ultimately, shifting and intensifying Chilean class struggle formed the decisive backdrop to Kissinger’s schemes. General polarization helped elites who, facing the possibility of class extinction, overcame their differences to vanquish the UP threat.

With the Right and business class reconverging, Allende’s program, and the growing popular tide that carried it, hit a wall. Amid ongoing working class mobilization, disagreements over how to confront the UP’s existential dilemmas tore the coalition into opposing camps. Popular forces not only stiffened elite recalcitrance; their divisions all but guaranteed workers’ defenseless once the onslaught came.

At the end of 1972, the class conflict was temporarily attenuated from above by the state and by workers from below. Factory employees set up powerful parallel institutions, networked factory and neighborhood assemblies called cordones industriales to guarantee production, distribution, security, and even military preparedness in the face of the elite offensive. Meanwhile, Allende restored a semblance of order by bringing the military into his cabinet. Both solutions carried new risks: the popular grassroots initiative fueled intra-UP polarization and encouraged the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) to push for a showdown; the double-edged decision to make top military men the arbiters of the Chilean road to socialism would likewise contribute to the catastrophic denouement within a year.

By the March 1973 parliamentary elections, Kissinger was convinced that demoralized workers would turn against their government; the additional $1.6 million he released to “optimize” the opposition’s campaign reassured him further. Even with their parties and movements now irreconcilably polarized, however, popular sectors continued to defend Allende, giving the UP 44 percent of their vote. Realizing that the poor were not ready to trade power for bread, Washington foreign policy elites finally converged on the idea of a decisive coup. Whereas the CIA’s Santiago station chief urged direct intervention, Kissinger maintained reservations about the army, the military’s crucial branch. However, these tactical restraints were easily ironed out in the pursuit of a strategic consensus around violently bringing the UP to heel — and he at last had a cohesive pro-coup domestic force with which he could play ball. The CD and the far right had also formed the Democratic Confederation (CODE) alliance, which subsequently won a majority.

Eventually, schemes approved by Kissinger began to bear fruit. The CIA remained in the dark about Augusto Pinochet’s commitments as the future dictator, just as it had no influence over the premature June Tanquetazo putsch. And though it remained frustrated by what it viewed as the top brass’s indecision, it continued to weave the network of plotters who aimed to marginalize the constitutionalist brass and eventually “save” the country from the Marxist “cancer.”

After the conspirators drove out constitutionalist Carlos Prats, who would also become a Condor victim when his booby-trapped car exploded in Buenos Aires, he was replaced with the taciturn general. Pinochet fell under the influence of the CIA-groomed commanders; as army chief, he would later use his pivotal position to outmaneuver his junta peers and concentrate power in his hands.

The stage was set for the denouement that everyone now expected. In late August, the CODE congress members voted eighty-one to the UP’s forty-seven in favor of a resolution inviting authorities “to put an immediate end” to “breach[es of] the Constitution … and ensuring the Constitutional order of our Nation.” The coup plotters had their green light and Allende had run out of options. The CDs, whose senators were now colluding with the military, rejected all overtures for a negotiated resolution, while divisions within the left impeded the pursuit of any coherent initiative. All, including Kissinger in Washington, sat back to wait for the inevitable.

With his own party now joining the MIR in its calls for armed confrontation, Allende’s last gasp, a planned plebiscite on new elections — an institutional abdication — was preempted by Pinochet’s eleventh-hour decision to join and lead the plotters. When Pinochet, a day after receiving Washington’s blessings, made his move, the UP was paralyzed by its strategic disagreements. By contrast, led by the army, elite opposition was seamlessly coordinated.

Allende was convinced the coup attempt would be a momentary setback. In his final speech, immediately before the presidential palace was bombarded and he ended his life rather than be taken by the military, he forecast:

They may possibly crush us. But tomorrow will be for the people, for the workers, because humanity progresses toward the conquest of a better life… Foreign capital, imperialism, jointly with reaction, created the climate for the Armed Forces to break with tradition… privileged class guilds [acted] to defend the advantages that a capitalist society confers onto a small minority… [But] much sooner rather than later, the great Alamedas will again open up for free Man to march through in order to build a better society.

Allende’s final prediction was far off the mark. The repression that ensued was ruthlessly methodical, as foretold by the ominous “Remember Jakarta” signs that had begun appearing across the capital. The national security advisor was instrumental in shaping and approving CIA backing for the junta’s plans for “severe repression to stamp out all vestiges of Communism in Chile for good.”

As a memo to Kissinger tallied, hundreds of militants, as well as labor and student activists, were killed in the days following that September 11, and many more were rounded up and tortured. By the end of the decade, over 4,000 were either killed or disappeared, and tens of thousands had either passed through the regime’s concentration camps or been forced into exile.

Though Chileans didn’t suffer the death toll of neighboring Argentina, and thankfully escaped Indonesian levels of mass state murder, the layer of worker activists that had powered Chile’s emancipatory march was wiped out. And with radical and popular organizations smashed, nothing could stop the sweeping institutional and economic changes that entrenched a new powerlessness among workers and the poor. The country would suffer almost forty years of dictatorship and neoliberal democracy before movements again filled the streets.

Naturally, Kissinger was jubilant. More than any other regional development, the desired outcome consolidated a trend that had begun with the 1970 coup in Bolivia and was further advanced by the Uruguayan coup in June. Within a year, the “dirty war” was underway in Argentina even before the coup against Perón’s widow.

Six years after his bald lie to Letelier, Kissinger traveled to Santiago and told another obvious untruth. Yet the day before his OAS speech expressing US concerns over widespread human rights violations, he admitted the deception to the “friendly” dictator, assuring Pinochet that “we are not out to weaken your position.” The speech, he explained, was mere spectacle for public consumption. In reality, Washington would defend and provide cover for the regime. “We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende. Otherwise… there would have been no human rights.”

Attributing the defense of human rights to Pinochet was typical Kissinger Orwellianism. But he was right about one thing: the coup was the product of Chilean elites and the military. Had they remained divided, American intervention would likely have failed, no matter Kissinger’s strategic clarity or abandonment of restraint. Conversely, once elites reunified, the dynamics of domestic class struggle would have produced the coup, even without effective US meddling. Still, Kissinger got what he wanted: the Southern Cone was much safer for US-led capitalism and Washington had dealt with the most unwieldy challenge to its regional supremacy.

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Order Only the Good Die Young [LINK], Jacobin’s book-length anti-obituary for Henry Kissinger, featuring contributions from Carolyn Eisenberg, Gerald Horne, Bancroft Prize-winner Greg Grandin, and others. Available now from Verso.

The Economist marked 50 years since the Chilean coup by calling for the country to move on from the past. What the magazine didn’t do was confront its own key role in demonizing Salvador Allende and building Augusto Pinochet’s international legitimacy.

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The Economist decided to mark the fifty-year anniversary of Chile’s coup by insisting that Chileans move on from the events of 1973 — even as its own writer distorted the historical record beyond recognition.

On September 11, 2023, exactly fifty years after the brutal 1973 coup, the Economist published an article under the ominous subheading: “Rather than cautionary tale, Salvador Allende has become a cherished myth for the left.”

In what was offered as a “hard history lesson,” the author declared that Chile’s coup “was home-grown and commanded much support among Chileans,” adding that it “was the consequence of a disastrous political failure, that of Allende’s Popular Unity coalition.”

In a separate post, the Economist announced that: “It would be better for Chile if Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet become purely historical figures, rather than sources of political inspiration.”

This is exactly the kind of historical revisionism and erasure that one might expect from a publication that played a role in the destabilization of Chilean democracy and itself helped to usher in the Pinochet government.

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“Abandoning Democratic Fair Dealing”

To understand the present-day apologia for Chile’s coup, it is worth revisiting how the Economist reported on Chile in the 1970s.

In the month between Chile’s 1970 election and Allende’s inauguration, the Economist ran a scare campaign suggesting that it might not be possible to remove Allende from power.

On September 12, 1970, eight days after his election victory, the Economist wrote that: “The first question thrown at the irascible Dr Allende, whose truculence bodes ill for his enemies, was whether he would hold free elections in 1976.”

The text, which ran under the header “But can they vote him out again?,” continued: “Having voted him into power, many Chileans are starting to wonder whether they will be able to vote him out again.”

The Economist also entertained the notion that Allende could be blocked from acceding to the presidency. On September 19, 1970, it noted that “many Chileans are still pinning their hopes to the outside possibility that congress could choose Sr Alessandri, abandoning democratic fair dealing, perhaps, but still staying within the law.”

At this time, such a plot was being covertly instigated by the CIA.

“One early scheme called for [Christian Democrat Eduardo] Frei to annul the elections, name a military cabinet to run the government, appoint the runner-up Jorge Alessandri as interim president, and resign with the expectation of running for president again in new elections,” declassified US files revealed.

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The Allende Years

Once Allende’s Popular Unity government was in power, the Economist published a series of articles ginning up the possibility of a coup, or even civil war, in Chile.

Between December 1971 and August 1973, the free-marketer weekly issued headers on Chile including “The portents of civil war,” “Birth of a civil war,” “Stirrings in the barracks,” “Generals in the wings,” “Leaving the army in charge,” and “The army will be tough this time.” Far from simply reporting on the developments in Chile, the coverage seemed to justify claims that a military intervention might be necessary.

Another article was published on September 1, 1973, ten days before the coup, with the threatening headline: “Near the road’s end.”

Paradoxically, the Economist was simultaneously disparaging Allende’s claims that the US government was working against him with the help of reactionary forces inside Chile.

In 1972, investigative journalist Jack Anderson revealed that the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) had conspired with the CIA to prevent Allende from coming to power.

“Come off ITT,” declared the Economist in April 1972. “The documents . . . have given Chile’s President Salvador Allende the chance to blame some of his political and economic problems on right-wing intrigues sponsored by the Americans.” It concluded: “In short, nothing terrible was done.”

In March 1973, the Economist even likened the Chilean left to the Nazis, complaining that “President Salvador Allende’s supporters seem to be trying — not for the first time — to employ the Reichstag fire technique to discredit his opponents.”

After a failed coup attempt against Allende on June 29, 1973, known as El Tanquetazo, the Economist spun the event into a win for the Popular Unity government. This “was just what President Allende of Chile needed to revive his government’s failures,” given it “will divert attention . . . from the state of the economy.”

And one month before the eventual coup, the Economist made the risible claim that Allende’s “constant accusations of right-wing plots no longer carry much conviction in Santiago.”

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Temporary Death

The Economist responded to Chile’s coup with a full-throated denial of US involvement, while placing the blame for the military takeover at the feet of Allende.

On September 15, 1973, it infamously declared that: “The temporary death of democracy in Chile will be regrettable, but the blame lies clearly with Dr Allende. . . . Their coup was homegrown, and attempts to make out that the Americans were involved are absurd.”

Over the following months, the Economist continued its apologia for the Pinochet government by countering Western critics of the dictatorship’s human rights record, and flattering its international credibility.

Under the header “They mustn’t forget why they struck down Allende,” the magazine announced in October 1973 that: “The junta has been the victim of a campaign of organised hostility in the west as well as of its own mistakes”.

The article continued: “Perhaps the imposition of martial law, the mass interrogations and the summary execution of snipers would not have aroused so much criticism if there were a clearer understanding of the events that precipitated the coup.”

Meanwhile, the Economist helped to shift responsibility for the coup onto the Chilean left by propagating the claim that “the extremists in the Allende government were preparing an insurrection of their own ‘to complete the revolution.’” It continued: “The only doubt is whether Dr Allende himself would have played the role of Lenin or Kerensky if that had finally come about.”

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The Economist and the Intelligence Services

The Economist’s reporting on Chile cannot be analyzed without reference to the publication’s connections to the US and British intelligence services.

During the 1970s, the Economist’s Latin American editor was a man named Robert Moss.

Recently declassified UK files show that Moss was “an IRD contact.” In other words, he was an asset of the Foreign Office’s secret Cold War propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD).

The IRD’s Latin American desk chief, Rosemary Allott, described Moss as “a bright young Australian and good company,” and encouraged British embassies across Latin America to assist Moss in his journalistic activities.

During the Cold War, the IRD also supported the Economist by purchasing copies of the magazine and distributing them to agents of influence in foreign countries such as journalists, politicians, and military figures.

In other words, the UK Foreign Office helped the Economist both downstream and upstream — by influencing its journalists’ output and assisting with the magazine’s distribution.

In 1972, Moss traveled to Chile to write a CIA-funded book about Allende’s Popular Unity government. Moss had been recommended to the CIA by Brian Crozier, an MI6 “alongsider” who was also in receipt of secret funding from the IRD, recently declassified files show.

Moss’s activities in Chile involved writing “negative stories on Allende almost every week” for the Economist, as historian Alexander Zevin found. He also lectured at CIA think tanks and rubbed shoulders with Chilean military officials.

Shortly after Moss’s visit to Chile, Allende personally intervened by writing a series of letters to the Chilean press. Allende was concerned that the Economist’s reports carried no byline (meaning nobody knew who was writing them), and were being uncritically republished across the Chilean press.

“Your newspaper has been publishing articles . . . that present a warped image of Chile’s reality, and which are not signed by any responsible journalist, but a ‘special correspondent’ of The Economist,” Allende wrote in a letter to Chilean daily La Tercera de la Hora. “Imposters like this cause considerable harm to our nation.”

Allende, of course, was correct. Moss operated within a shady network of US and British intelligence officials, and the Economist’s work was seen to be actively contributing to the destabilization of the Chilean government.

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“My Enemy Is Dead!”

After the coup, Moss transformed his CIA-funded book on Allende into an apologia for the Pinochet dictatorship. Named Chile’s Marxist Experiment, the book declared that the Chilean military’s “decision to intervene had nothing to do with Washington.”

Moss’ book was so favorable to the Chilean dictatorship that the junta bought 9,750 copies of it for distribution through its embassies.

Upon hearing news of Allende’s death, Moss also reportedly danced down the corridors of the Economist’s headquarters chanting: “My enemy is dead!”.

Pablo Sepúlveda Allende is the grandson of Salvador Allende. He recently spoke about Moss’s reaction to the coup in Chile for a forthcoming film about Britain’s secret role in the death of Chile’s democracy, stating that “the unfortunate thing is that certain parts of the press are not independent — they’re financed or form part of major economic interest groups.”

Moss would go on to become a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, who described Pinochet as Britain’s “staunch, true friend” and praised the former dictator for having “brought democracy to Chile.”

The Economist marked Thatcher’s death rather differently to that of Allende’s, commemorating the former UK prime minister in April 2013 as a “Freedom fighter.” “The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom,” the article noted — which will undoubtedly come as news to Chileans.

For his part, Crozier went on to help Pinochet write the 1980 Chilean constitution, which still hangs over the country today.

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The great achievements of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile have often been overshadowed by its brutal defeat. But the fall of his government wasn’t inevitable.

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Fifty years ago, Chile’s road to socialism suffered a devastating defeat. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, spurred by elites, condoned by middle-class sectors, and backed by Washington, toppled Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, or UP), a vibrant though strained coalition government helmed by the Communist (CP) and Socialist (SP) parties.

The coup, which progressives have been commemorating the world over, smashed workers’ organizations, popular movements, and democratic institutions, murdering thousands and sending orders of magnitude more to torture centers, concentration camps, and internal and international exile. In ushering in a seventeen-year dictatorship and laying the groundwork for thirty years of postauthoritarian free-market supremacy in Chile, it also seemed to eliminate one the most promising experiments in democratic socialism from working-class and radical strategic arsenals.

To our great disadvantage, radicals seem convinced that the UP’s road to socialism — the extraordinarily complex endeavor to build an “institutional apparatus for a new form of pluralistic, free socialist order,” as Allende put it — was doomed from the beginning. Over the decades, our political vision remains mired in the polarized assessments first offered in the heat of Allende’s coalition’s tumultuous years in power.

Either the UP moderated its aims and accommodated elites in order to survive, or it abandoned all compromise and sharpened the class struggle to accelerate decisive confrontation. Both options portended failure: slowing the process of change in pursuit of conciliation was capitulation; speeding it up toward a final showdown was suicide.

After half a century, we must move beyond this dichotomized, and paralyzing, analysis of the UP’s alleged impasse. It points radicals in the wrong direction by overlooking the real potential to build and expand a popular majority that might have both preempted the coup and bought Allende time to find more sustainable ways to advance the UP’s transformative program. With the Left in government again, this year’s commemorations enjoin us to take full stock of the Chilean road to socialism.

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Washington’s Role

No remembrance of the Allende years is complete without an explanation of the toppling of his government. In answering what produced the coup, it helps to rule out what did not cause it. Two flawed explanations that remain dominant: first, observers point to American imperialism; second, critics attribute the UP’s fall to the weakness of its leaders, Allende in particular.

Our political vision remains mired in the polarized assessments first offered in the heat of Allende’s coalition’s tumultuous years in power.

Against the received wisdom among the global left, the coup was not the consequence of US intervention and CIA machinations. This is not to deny Washington’s direct involvement, but simply to state that American meddling was not the driving force and central factor behind the UP’s toppling. Washington did promote the coup and participate in its orchestration. However, US intervention only contributed to Allende’s removal once primary domestic factors created the indispensable context for imperialist aims.

In fact, the United States had intervened repeatedly to keep Allende from power, but it had typically failed in accomplishing its aims. US efforts to thwart socialist victory in Chile began even before the 1970 campaign. After Allende’s coalition came within three points of winning the 1958 vote, Washington generously financed Christian Democrat (CD) Eduardo Frei in the following presidential elections. The CIA funneled $2.6 million into Frei’s victorious 1964 campaign, covering over half of its costs.

Six years later, one more facing a formidable run by Allende, Washington allocated nearly half a million dollars to fund anti-UP propaganda. When Allende was elected on September 4 despite these measures, the Nixon administration approved another ten million, or “more if necessary,” to prevent the socialist politician’s inauguration and “save Chile” by taking steps to “make the economy scream.” Yet in spite of its generous — and undeniably illegal and reprehensible — meddling, the United States failed to block a socialist ascent to power in Chile.

Many point to the CIA’s record of funneling millions of dollars into Frei’s winning 1964 campaign as evidence of long-standing and decisive American influence over domestic Chilean affairs. But illegal CIA funding of Allende’s rival, which did add useful resources for his victory, only supports the argument against singling US intervention as the overriding factor behind the defeat of Chile’s road to socialism. Although CIA financing helped Frei win by 56 to 39 percent, the CDs were in a position to handily top Allende because Frei ran with the unified support of traditional business elites, as well as modernizing industrialists and middle layers.

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The Limits of Intervention

Washington’s inability to prevent Allende’s victory and inauguration in 1970 underscores the limits to imperialist designs. In his fourth run, and the third one heading a solidified Communist-Socialist alliance, Allende snuck by with a plurality of 37 percent of votes. Yet even with a shaky UP victory, one presumably susceptible to CIA plots, US efforts to keep Allende from assuming the presidency failed.

In spite of its generous — and undeniably illegal and reprehensible — meddling, the United States failed to block a socialist ascent to power in Chile.

American intelligence services conspired in vain with Chilean business elites, reactionary Chilean intelligence officials, and outgoing president Frei to sabotage the inauguration. One hastily hatched plan to generate turmoil by kidnapping the constitutionalist commander of the military backfired when General René Schneider was killed in the clumsily executed operation.

Washington’s next attempt to dictate the outcome fell apart when it failed to persuade the UP’s parliamentary opponents to vote against Allende’s confirmation. Its scheme with Frei involved pressuring the former president’s coreligionists to produce a constitutional crisis that could then be resolved by calling for snap elections once Allende was rejected. But the Christian Democrat left wing, behind its progressive candidate, Radomiro Tomic, withstood Washington’s heavy-handedness, again underscoring the fallacy of imperialist omnipotence.

In the end, of course, US intervention did contribute to the fall of Chile’s socialist government. But outside meddling did not cause its demise. Ruthless diplomacy, an intensifying embargo, funding for a truckers’ shutdown, and support for fascistic street terror all weakened Allende’s authority and, more importantly, the UP’s ability to sustain material improvements for its social base. But this tightening chokehold, while undeniably impactful, did not accomplish its aim until decisive domestic circumstances yielded fertile ground for it.

As elaborated below, Chilean class forces aligned to place the UP in check and facilitate a pro-coup balance of power. Without a domestic coalition that called for military action, American intervention remained insufficiently potent to topple Allende.

This assessment in no way downplays, and much less excuses, harmful US meddling. But it has key implications worth noting. Firstly, it should fortify radicals against the paralyzing belief in imperialism’s all-powerful and omnipresent reach. Secondly, and relatedly, it shows that, barring outright invasion, domestic class politics, when effectively wielded by the Left, can inoculate against foreign meddling.

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Expanding Social Property

The other prominent explanation for the UP’s failure, one rehearsed by radicals in particular, pivots from external threats to look for fatal flaws inside Chile’s road to socialism. This view holds that Allende determined his own fate by handicapping his radical program and supporters.

Just as during the UP years, when Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and far-left Socialists relentlessly berated the government (and particularly Communist officials who largely shared the president’s strategic approach), this line of argument is typically professed by ultraleft forces. But even measured and sympathetic contemporary analysts promoted the thesis that conciliatory constitutionalism was a certain “path to disaster.” Ralph Miliband argued that Allende’s conciliation, in weakening the working class and emboldening his opponents, contained “all the elements of self-fulfilling catastrophe.”

It seems curious to reproach Allende for his supposed unwillingness to advance a radical economic transformation.

Arguments in this vein insist that the commitment of Allende and his allies to bourgeois institutions defanged Chile’s revolutionary thrust and left it hopelessly exposed to the treachery of domestic enemies. While its strands tend to get muddled, they can be classified into two accounts. The first focuses on the UP’s restraint in its economic program; the second alludes to Allende’s extreme caution around promoting a confrontation between the rising militancy of his working-class base and elite opposition.

It seems curious to reproach Allende for his supposed unwillingness to advance a radical economic transformation. The armchair sectarian argument claims that the UP left itself vulnerable to a capital strike by its class enemies by not nationalizing more productive assets that were in private hands. In other words, Allende’s compliance with private property rules facilitated business withholding of investment — a classic extortionist ploy that tanked the economy. Yet this narrative hardly fits the UP’s actual record.

In addition to nationalizing the copper industry, Allende accelerated the land reform process, all but eliminating the landed class, and vigorously pursued the expropriation not just of the economy’s “commanding heights,” but of most large-scale manufacturing. In fact, by 1973, over half of total national output was accounted for by the public sector, including banking, mining, foreign trade, basic industry, and even important light manufacturing sectors like textiles and key foodstuffs.

Firms and industries transferred to the ever-expanding Área de Propiedad Social (Social Property Realm) included those whose takeover had been announced in Allende’s platform as well as unplanned ones resulting from escalating labor-management disputes. During his first year in office, all but two of the seventy planned nationalizations — comprising firms deemed monopolistic and strategic — had been accomplished.

In 1972, the government decreed another 113 expropriations; the following year, Allende seized 219 more before the UP’s toppling. By some estimates, up to 80 percent of Chilean manufacturing was nationalized. Rather than leaving the Chilean road to socialism exposed, the UP systematically disarmed the ruling class of its economic leverage over the state and society. This was hardly a submissive attitude toward the business class.

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Mobilizing Workers

When not denouncing Allende for his obliviousness to the sabotaging power of the investment function, many insist on blaming the UP’s defeat on his naive reluctance to unleash working-class insurgency against the ruling class and institutions. Invoking the undeniable from-below militancy that often drove the aforementioned nationalizations, radicals confidently declare that the UP should have harnessed workers’ ferment, directing it to preemptively conquer remaining business property and supplant the state’s governing bodies.

This assessment largely follows the MIR’s sloganeering of the early 1970s. Along with the left wing of his own party, the MIR activists reproached Allende’s legalist timidity and called for “combating this reformism, challenging and overtaking the authority of that government and the program of the UP” (emphasis added). Their call was to “avanzar sin transar,” or push forward with no compromises.

Spurning caution, Allende’s task, we are told, was to instigate, rather than restrict, grassroots mobilization, shifting it onto the offensive against the bases of elite rule. While expanding land and factory occupations would remove their economic foundations, alternative forms of popular power — from “soviet-style” cordones industriales that attempted to coordinate workers’ management of production and supplies to insurgent local governing bodies like the commandos comunales — would mature from their embryonic form to sweep over “bourgeois” state bureaucracies.

Considering the inescapable backlash by elites, the UP’s only hope was to get ahead of the impending coup and ride the wave of surging militance and deploy it for the definitive showdown. In Miliband’s verdict, the UP had to “encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses.’”

The overarching objective by 1972–73 was to substantially advance, not complete, the process of radical reform.

To prepare for the looming showdown, as leader of Chile’s road to revolution, Allende’s historic responsibility was to arm peasants, workers, students, and shantytown militants. Instead, he displayed a foolhardy allegiance to republican rules of the game. Unwilling to meet the moment and drive it toward decisive class confrontation, Allende disarmed workers, rendering them defenseless against looming civil war.

Once more, the self-assuredness of this assessment is dubious. The overarching objective by 1972–73 was to substantially advance, not complete, the process of radical reform. After all, Allende and his supporters never envisioned an immediate transition to socialism within his presidency’s short timeframe. Instead, with overwhelming support from the workers and the poor, the aim was to end “domination by the imperialists [transnationals], the monopolies, and the landed oligarchy in order to initiate the construction of socialism in Chile” (emphasis added).

The key was to accomplish critical transformative and redistributive reforms that would better position working people and the labor movement to carry out more comprehensive anti-capitalist restructuring. Allende, his CP allies, and the vast majority of workers subscribed to this strategic plan.

Rising popular power organs were key instruments that workers built to confront measures deployed by elites against the progress of the Chilean road. Yet they were erected atop capacities that generations of workers, poor people, and their parties had painstakingly struggled to develop. As the campaign for socialism was to be fought over the long haul, Allende and popular militants understood the need to preserve and nurture these capacities.

Faced with the prospects of an unwinnable civil war, Allende was compelled to avert a useless bloodbath. His unwillingness to risk their destruction in a premature and hopeless final battle reflected a commitment to promoting workers’ interests in a manner rooted in the preferences and activity of the class. This efficacious adherence to workers’ needs and empowerment is what made the Chilean road to socialism so threatening.

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Domestic Alignments

If neither US meddling nor Allende’s reluctance to break with bourgeois institutions can explain the coup, what caused the defeat of the Chilean road to socialism? Rather than outside intervention or a deficient line by its leaders, it was intractable — though not inexorable — domestic realignments that led to the violent toppling of Chile’s radical democratic experiment.

Understanding why the Chilean road to socialism was defeated requires a brief explanation of how the UP found an opening to power in the first place.

Bluntly, and tragically, the ruling class outmaneuvered the UP. Elites succeeded in uniting with middle sectors and state modernizers to create a pro-coup alliance that the working class and its party leaders failed to counter. When its commitment to ending their domination crystalized as the UP’s defining feature, business elites, now shielded by the backing of middle and managerial layers, organized the military’s intervention.

Understanding why the Chilean road to socialism was defeated requires a brief explanation of how the UP found an opening to power in the first place. As mentioned above, national political factors shaped the Chilean road’s fate. Just as US intervention proved ineffectual until domestic disputes created the environment for it to be influential, shifting class configurations provided an opening for Allende’s triumph. Divisions among elite and governing forces resulted in UP opponents competing against one another in the 1970 elections, handing the socialist coalition victory with a plurality of votes.

Ruling elites had adopted the opposite approach in the previous elections. In 1964, landowning and industrial oligarchs chose not to field a candidate, even though they had triumphed six years prior. In 1958, conservative Jorge Alessandri had himself won with a plurality, largely because centrist forces were in flux. Before successfully regrouping, they divided proreform votes between a declining Radical Party, which had headed the Popular Front government of the late 1930s and 1940s, and the rising CDs, who proposed a new agenda of modernization with social justice.

Although the fragmented electorate gave way to a right-wing government, it also allowed the socialist coalition to come dangerously close. Allende, running on the Frente de Acción Popular (FRAP) ticket, had reached 28 percent of votes, up from just 5.5 percent in 1952, and merely 2.5 points shy of Alessandri’s winning tally. Business learned a valuable lesson: if anti-socialist forces did not band together, surging workers’ movements might place their parties in power.

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From Consensus to Division

Under Alessandri, the economy stagnated. Along with slow growth and low profits, working-class wages eroded, labor militance rose, and the Left’s influence grew further. With the FRAP looming as potential victors in the 1964 elections, key sections of the industrial elite aligned behind the middle-class professionals and developmentalists who championed Frei’s CD candidacy.

Predictably, the pro-Allende vote swelled to almost 40 percent. But as elites and modernizing professionals voted in unison, Frei won in a landslide with 56 percent of votes. The key to protecting Chile’s emerging market economy was to remain unfractured.

The disappointment and incoherence of Frei’s term nonetheless dissolved proestablishment cohesiveness. The CDs had pledged to boost growth and productivity through renewed industrialization policies and a thorough transformation of Chile’s backward agrarian sector. Economic transformation would be accompanied by expanded organization and incorporation of marginalized popular sectors in the countryside and rapidly proliferating urban callampas, or shanties.

Instead of forging a cross-class national consensus, Eduardo Frei’s reforms exacerbated class conflict.

However, instead of forging a cross-class national consensus, Frei’s reforms exacerbated class conflict. His “revolution in freedom” program, and the social tensions it intensified, went too far for business while proving insufficient for the Left, including a radicalizing sector in his own party. His ambitious land reform and an increasingly uncontainable industrial and popular insurgency embittered the Right. But Frei’s restraint in restructuring property and labor relations, and his use of repression against protest, alienated critics and rebels within Christian Democracy.

As a result, with Allende’s coalition seeking to capitalize on rising discontent and mobilization, traditional economic elites committed to restoring a conservative model of market development, while a growing Christian Democrat left proposed anti-capitalist reforms to solve the country’s unequal and erratic growth regime. Although the CD radicals who gained the upper hand flirted with a broad Christian and Marxist “popular unity” that would run a single socialist candidate, when campaigning for the 1970 election got underway, three major blocs competed for power.

In short, as intensified challenges of capitalist development pulled elites and modernizing managers apart, an opportunity opened for the Chilean road to socialism. With 36.6 percent, Allende’s coalition beat out the CDs (28 percent of votes) and Alessandri’s reactionary gambit (35.3 percent). Although his advantage was slimmer than the 1958 margin of victory, elite divisions gave Allende a tenuous victory.

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Popular Unity in Power

Allende’s government, particularly during its first two years, was an object lesson in transferring power from the country’s class rulers to organized workers and public management. Before a downturn set in, UP policies facilitated rapid economic expansion and massive improvements for toiling sectors.

Allende’s government was an object lesson in transferring power from the country’s class rulers to organized workers and public management.

As the material well-being of workers and the poor improved, their organization and influence also expanded, affording them enhanced leverage over employers and the wealthy. The mutually-enhancing advances — in well-being and power — generated a short-lived virtuous cycle that translated into growing electoral support for the UP and increasing desperation from elites.

The cornerstone for the economic transformations and growth proposed by the UP was the nationalization of the copper industry, the leading sector that Allende referred to as the country’s “wage.” Control of mining and exports would underwrite the UP’s redistributive campaigns as well as its program to accelerate and upgrade Chile’s industrialization.

Overarching frustration with the “Chileanization” copper scheme of Allende’s predecessor Frei and with the general stagnation resulting from his failed economic modernization strategies allowed the UP to quickly push through nationalization with unanimous parliamentary backing. The policy resonated with such a broad array of social layers that even the Right did not dare oppose it.

Public control of copper had an immediate impact. Despite an array of difficulties, Chile boosted national production during Allende’s first year. Even after mineral transnationals conspired to sink global prices by 25 percent, the UP earned nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars — the equivalent of over $5.5 billion today — in copper exports. All told, the economy experienced an unprecedented yearly growth rate of nearly ten percent. Taking back the “people’s wage” dynamized the economy.

Investment proceeded apace, reaching 20 percent of GDP, a figure even the probusiness military government never matched. Given the commanding role of the state in Chile’s industry, more than half of capital formation was fueled by public investment. Impressively, when copper exports fell, cutting into the national “wage,” productivity rose, particularly in key intermediate goods where it expanded by nearly a quarter from 1970 to 1971.

Even as the international blockade and the domestic truckers’ strike brought output to a halt in 1972, and public investment inevitably plummeted, productivity held in durable and capital goods and kept expanding in intermediate sectors as the UP continued to tap into the country’s idle industrial capacity. As a consequence, even when growth stalled during his tumultuous second year in office, Allende succeeded in advancing structural transformations and meeting the UP’s redistributive mandate.

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Working-Class Gains

Chilean workers experienced the largest wage increases ever during the UP’s first two years. In 1971, real average wages grew by 22 percent. While Allende increased overall minimums by one-eighth, industrial and agricultural wage floors fared the best, rising by nearly two-fifths. The average hike in manufacturing wages that first year was 25 percent.

Even when growth stalled during his tumultuous second year in office, Allende succeeded in advancing structural transformations and meeting the UP’s redistributive mandate.

While mean wages reflected mandated increases, they also resulted from historic unemployment lows. The expansion driven by the UP’s control of the economy brought 1971 joblessness down to 3.8 percent; it fell another 3.1 percent the following year. Indeed, even as productivity declined beginning in 1972, national output was able to expand as the social property area absorbed increasing numbers of workers.

Chile’s near full employment under Allende gave workers the market leverage to command higher real wages and defend them through 1972. Meanwhile, social provision expanded for Chilean workers and the poor. After its first full year in power, the UP had elevated public spending on social security to 12 percent of GDP — a jump of nearly two-fifths.

All told, achievements for workers were unprecedented. By the end of 1972, labor’s share of national income surpassed 50 percent, expanding by a third in just two years! Blue-collar laborers benefited the most as their portion grew from slightly above one-fifth to one-third of all income.

Losing ground in terms of property and income was not the only change that terrified the ruling class. Despite criticisms of Allende’s alleged restraint, the UP did more than favor the working class materially — it also gave them power. The socialist government’s empowerment of workers and the poor went beyond conferring economic protection that freed them to make demands and mobilize collection action.

As critical as such security was, the UP also institutionalized their rising organization into systemic influence. Workers’ newfound leverage came in the form of recognized popular organizations that the UP incorporated, not without tension, into democratic decision-making processes, both in the economy and in government. Invigorated power resources of the poor comprised unions, neighborhood associations, and workers’ and peasant councils — all of which played central roles in driving and carrying out the UP democratic socialist policies.

Unions were the backbone of soaring workers’ power. Although unionization had steadily grown under Chile’s midcentury developmentalism and cohered increasingly following the 1953 founding of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile (CUT) national labor federation, worker organization and mobilization reached new levels of intensity after Allende’s election.

When the government was toppled, union density stood at an all-time high of around 42 percent, representing an expansion of 7 points over the already high 1970 level and a mark not seen since. Unionization was highest in core strategic industries, with density around 60, 65, 55, 35, and 100 percent in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transport, and banking, respectively.

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Popular Power

Laboring Chileans did not limit their organization to unions. In workplaces as well as the countryside and neighborhoods, ordinary people formed assemblies, councils, and committees to take over management of local affairs.

Plants slated for expropriation or ones that were occupied by workers demanding public takeover saw the formation of councils in which labor representatives participated in managing the nationalized property. Balancing the role of workers as managers of industry with the duty of unions to represent their interests generated considerable friction.

In workplaces as well as the countryside and neighborhoods, ordinary people formed assemblies, councils, and committees to take over management of local affairs.

Shanty dwellers organized commandos to coordinate their actions, many of which became local associations. At a crucial juncture, neighborhood groups coordinated with the government to create “supply and price boards” (Juntas de Abastecimiento y Control de Precios) to overcome the havoc in distribution caused by the truckers’ shutdown and to combat hoarding and speculation stoking the black market.

We can debate, as certain currents on the Left never tire of doing, whether these institutions of popular organization simply became transmission belts of a reformist government unwilling to break with the bourgeois state. But this by now trite quarrel misses their standout feature.

Incontrovertibly, thriving workers’ institutions augmented the wherewithal of workers to advance their interests and gave Chilean socialism a potent tool to wield against elite intransigence. The UP, during its truncated time in office, fomented ordinary people’s organizations, supporting a process of transferring power from ruling to formerly dominated classes.

Ordinary Chileans took hold of these structures, agitating to improve their livelihoods and to assert their influence over national affairs. In fact, even prior to Allende’s election, rising popular organization put all candidates on notice. The CUT carried out a general strike in the year prior, and peasants and workers multiplied estate and plant seizures. While workers and the poor coordinated their collective action to support the UP’s policy goals, they did not subordinate their rising insurgency to Allende’s dictates.

Far from demobilizing after the UP triumph, workers went on the offensive. The strike wave that hit Frei’s final years in office continued relentlessly. From the 1,819 stoppages during the last year of the CD presidency, strikes increased to 2,709 in 1971 and again to 3,289 in 1972. Extending and activating militancy across sectors and economic spheres, they mobilized growing associational capacities to impress their grievances on partisan officials and state managers.

The clearest, though far from the only, manifestation of rising assertiveness was the avalanche that took hold of industry. The UP had electrified Chilean workers, and their enhanced power radiated to all economic sectors and social spheres.

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Rules of the Game

Allende’s adherence to “bourgeois rules of the game” did not bring about the UP’s “self-fulfilling” defeat. The opposite is closer to the truth. Rather than conciliatory weakness, rising working-class influence and the danger it posed to elite domination propelled the authoritarian forces that promoted and carried out the coup.

Threatened from the start, top business and military officials began planning a coup the instant that Allende won the 1970 elections.

Threatened from the start, top business and military officials began planning a coup the instant that Allende won the 1970 elections. But it was not until the dread of losing their ruling status engulfed the entire business class, and fear of instability and recklessness prevailed among middle sectors and significant layers of the working class, that elites could put their schemes into effect.

Intensifying after mid-1972, the UP had forestalled these machinations, not through legalist timidity or concessionary tradeoffs, but owing to a calibrated strategy amid rising worker power. The delicate balance entailed fostering transformative capacity on the one hand while impairing the opposition’s ability to destroy these capacities on the other. As Allende laid out in his first speech before Congress:

If we should forget that our mission is to establish a [society designed for the service of man], the whole struggle of our people for socialism will become simply one more reformist experiment. If we should forget the concrete conditions from which we start in order to try and create immediately something which surpasses our possibilities, then we shall also fail.

“Surpassing” what was feasible and insisting on socialist rupture would backfire by instigating a pro-coup alignment. Yet this in no way meant confining oneself to existing limits. The ongoing development of workers’ power, lest it be wasted on “one more reformist experiment,” was intended precisely to augment, while protecting, prospects for ongoing transformations.

Success depended not only on outflanking CIA schemes, but on increasing support for Allende while simultaneously ensuring the ruling class and bureaucratic modernizers did not restore an anti-socialist unity. Through the tumultuous employers’ offensive of mid-to-late 1972 and until March 1973, the UP’s steady hand managed to preempt the cohesion of an authoritarian coalition while simultaneously bolstering reforms and workers’ capacities.

The Chilean road to socialism failed when the rise of laboring sectors was unable to thwart the pro-coup alignment. Concretely, the UP was toppled after its elite opponents overcame their divisions and reunited following the March 1973 parliamentary elections.

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Setbacks and Resilience

The material advances secured for workers and the poor during the UP’s first year resulted in significant increases in mass support. Their growing empowerment only deepened their identification with the Chilean road.

In its first national electoral test, Allende’s coalition exceeded all expectations, taking just over half of all valid ballots in the 1971 local elections. Both the Socialists and Communists increased their support, the former by 10 points, while the CDs held their share and the conservative National Party (PN) saw its share drop by nearly half.

The material advances secured for workers and the poor during the UP’s first year resulted in significant increases in mass support.

In addition to expanding popular support from 37 to 51 percent, the UP continued to face a divided opposition. Surging preferences for socialism and quarreling elites was precisely what Allende needed. Unfortunately, this favorable configuration crumbled over the next two years.

The next major test at the ballot box came in March 1973. By then, the combined effects of sabotage of distribution, merchant hoarding, and an international commercial blockade had badly eroded workers’ income gains. On top of endemic shortages of key wage goods, rising inflation meant real wages contracted significantly, by 23 percent in 1972 and even further in 1973.

Both wings of the opposition wagered that these hardships would erode popular commitments to Chilean socialism. Each side hoped to gain the upper hand in order to dictate the terms of a UP capitulation. Against their prognosis, however, support for the UP held up, falling only slightly to 44 percent. Compared to 1970, the socialist option gained an even more commanding plurality.

The failure to weaken the UP at the polls promoted elite opponents to abandon their tactical alliance for defeating Allende’s government by electoral means. They fully embraced instead a strategic unity for quashing Chile’s road to socialism extraconstitutionally. Realizing their inability to achieve the upper hand politically, professional modernizers joined the economic ruling class’s mission to topple the UP.

From that point forward, the country’s politics featured a sequence of maneuvers to end the government. Truckers paralyzed transport again, professional guilds shut down health care and other essential areas, fascistic shock troops rampaged, and Congress obstructed the administration by impeaching one minister after another.

The final move came in late August, when CD and PN congressmen approved a resolution by eighty-one to forty-seven votes mandating “authorities” to “put an immediate end” to “breach[es of] the Constitution . . . with the goal of redirecting government activity toward the path of law . . .” In short, Chilean elites had put aside their differences, unequivocally calling on the military to overthrow the UP.

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Balancing Act

By the middle of 1973, the UP’s balancing act had failed: the inevitable impasse foretold by dominant analyses had arrived. At that point, defeat was almost unavoidable: either Allende backed down, whether by resigning or offering all the concessions demanded by the opposition, or the looming confrontation would touch off and crush socialist reforms and forces.

In the end, a version of the latter scenario unfolded. The final showdown for which the MIR and left-wing Socialists agitated and prepared turned out to be a one-sided class war. No serious groundwork to overturn bourgeois institutions and ruling classes had occurred. Indeed, no such preparation could have taken place or succeeded.

Not only were three years absurdly insufficient to raise the working-class armies the ultras fantasized about. More to the point, Chile’s road to socialism was never to be an insurrectionary “war of movement.”

Instead, it turned on the constant development of working-class organization and power, the expansion of which aimed to hold the ruling class at bay, while radically transforming governing institutions into a democratic and emancipatory socialist order. It is therefore critical to pose one more question: Could Allende’s delicate balancing resting on expanding working-class power have been sustained?

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Wedge Tactics

Although the UP appeared to reach a dead end following the March 1973 elections, the thesis of Allende’s inevitable doom is overstated. Both versions of this thesis disregard the possibility that the key requirements for UP success remained current even beyond that year’s intensifying challenges.

Of course, ruling elites might have orchestrated a coup even if the UP had continued to foster these crucial conditions; after all, key sections of business and revanchist managerial and military sections were openly calling for it. But if imperialist intervention was not determinant, and elite positions were subject to change, then socialist decisions could still decisively shape the outcome.

Even as late as March 1973, latitude remained for impeding elite unity and gaining additional, and pivotal, working-class approval.

In the crucial moments when elite alignments were taking shape, protecting Chile’s road to socialism necessitated maintaining a wedge between the CDs and economic oligarchs and attaining even broader mass support. These achievements would surely have raised the barriers to military intervention. Both were feasible.

Dominant analyses of the UP’s failure deny this possibility. They treat the balance of power as an immutable boundary and argue that the array of class forces at that moment called for definitive measures. The “rupturist” view insists that the opposing camps were set in stone, and that further delay only advantaged the ruling class. The “accommodationist” view, on the other hand, holds that the extant positions of social constituencies required Allende to yield immediately to his opponents’ demands.

In reality, even as late as March 1973, latitude remained for impeding elite unity and gaining additional, and pivotal, working-class approval. In fact, these dual imperatives were complementary. And they hinged on the UP’s approach to the CDs.

This was not because concessions to its conservative leadership could be traded for the completion of Allende’s term. Rather, it reflected the persistent commitment to anti-capitalist policies among the influential Christian Democrat left wing and among a critical swath of the party’s working-class constituents. Cooperation with the former would have undercut the putschist intrigues of its right-wing leadership, while constructive dialogue with radical Christian workers would have buttressed the UP against the coup plotters.

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The Christian Democrat Left

Given the indispensability of a broadened majoritarian mass base, it is useful to consider the implications of engaging with the CD mass base. In a sense, this involves asking how much more working-class support the UP could have tapped, and how much might come from CD rank-and-filers.

The UP had achieved hegemonic influence among Chilean workers by the time of the coup.

It is true that the UP had achieved hegemonic influence among Chilean workers by the time of the coup. Overall, the socialist electorate had swelled from 5.5 percent in 1952 to roughly half of all voters in twenty years. The bulk of this dramatic and sustained growth came from industrial labor.

Fairly reliable surveys of Greater Santiago, an area comprising more than one-quarter of the country’s population, revealed that over the fifteen-year period leading up to the coup, blue-collar workers consistently accounted for around half of all UP support. Unsurprisingly, increasing shares of blue-collar workers identified with the radical coalition.

While the percentage of white-collar workers reporting a preference for Allende’s program grew from 15.5 percent in 1958 to 52 percent in 1972 — an impressive jump! — proportions of blue-collar supporters rose to 69 percent. Precisely when discontent with Allende spiked following the 1972 truckers’ shutdown, workers were overwhelmingly coming to his defense.

Yet even as the UP had indisputably galvanized supermajoritarian backing among wage earners, important sections continued to sympathize with the CDs. Following the party’s ascent after its 1957 founding, general CD support declined quickly, from 42 percent in 1965 to 26 percent in 1971. Nonetheless, during those years, its working-class constituency remained stable.

After Frei mustered nearly three-fifths of blue-collar voters in his successful 1964 campaign, thereafter, about one-quarter of these wage earners consistently identified with the CDs until the coup. These were not the privileged employees typically associated with the CDs; indeed, 46 percent and 36 percent of professionals and white-collar employees, respectively, identified with the party in 1972, according to the above-cited survey series.

Nor were they disproportionately unorganized and informal wage earners, among whom the CDs had cultivated a strong base. Almost the exact same proportion of unionized workers — 24.8 percent — voted for the CDs in the momentous CUT elections held in April of that year. Even as over two-thirds of low-skilled and manufacturing employees rallied behind the UP, this hard-core minority stuck with the party.

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Countering the Coup Plotters

A solid proportion of these workers could have been counted on to defend Chile’s road to socialism. After all, most manufacturing wage earners who voted CD in 1970 enthusiastically backed Tomic’s program of socializing industry in the form of “workers’ firms.” After Frei’s government was judged too moderate, Tomic’s radical reform program, which was only slightly more moderate than Allende’s, helped preserve substantial working-class backing for the CDs.

Indeed, polls that year revealed that a full 12 percent of CD voters identified as leftists, which in the Chilean context meant adopting anti-capitalist positions. Overall, 62 percent of respondents — nearly twice Allende’s vote share — agreed that the state should socialize properties of the wealthy. Even after economic difficulties began mounting in mid-1972, poor and working people of all partisan stripes continued to approve of Allende’s government.

Well into 1973, popular sectors characterized by Christian Democrat sympathies, such as rural laborers and urban shanty dwellers, endorsed Allende.

Well into 1973, popular sectors characterized by CD sympathies, such as rural laborers and urban shanty dwellers, endorsed Allende. Nearly two-thirds of respondents who prioritized completing the land reform process or solving the housing crisis rated him favorably. As among the overall working population, a sizable minority of them would have been CD loyalists.

Preserving the affinity of CD voters would have added significantly to a pro-socialist bloc. The sympathy of a solid portion of unionized workers alone would have restored the majority that had voted for UP in 1971.

If just half of CD votes in the CUT elections had been added to the 1973 UP totals, the socialist vote would have increased by a couple of percentage points. The addition of half of the CD’s unionized peasants would have bumped the pro-socialist total by the same amount, producing parity with the anti-UP opposition.

More decisively, the addition of a sizable fraction of unorganized CD-leaning laborers along with a chunk of organized members of the party’s popular sector organizations would have given Chilean socialism a significant overall majority. Had popular preferences in mid-1973 been reversed, arrayed 55 to 44 percent in favor of the UP, the coup plotters would have been, if not deterred, substantially hobbled.

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Partisan Dynamics

If working-class Chileans overwhelmingly favored socialist transformation, why did a strong majority favoring the Chilean road to socialism fail to materialize? The answer lies in the interparty dynamics and the influence partisan leaderships exerted on rank-and-file constituencies.

In the hyperpartisan context of 1960s and ’70s Chile, the positions of ordinary Chileans reflected the polarization among political officials.

In the hyperpartisan context of 1960s and 1970s Chile, and after decades in which parties helped lead the expansion of mass organizations, the positions of ordinary Chileans reflected the polarization among political officials. Although the mass constituencies of parties had developed a keen appreciation of their material interests and demands, this was ultimately filtered through the calculations of the vibrant party apparatuses that guided their political activity. Confronted with the fervent debates over competing visions of the future of Chilean society, rank and filers tended to follow the strategies preferred by reliable party leaders.

In the case of working-class CD constituents, they trusted the orientation of figures like Frei’s rival Tomic and other left-wingers. They repudiated what they perceived as the MIR’s youthful and reckless adventurism, rejected the armed-struggle line that remained an official SP plank, and trembled at “dictatorship of the proletariat” proclamations. Already skeptical of the belligerent rhetoric — and often shocking actions — of many UP parties and militants, many CD workers felt their leaders’ opposition offered a more trustworthy and less costly road map to socialist reform.

Crucially, those same CD leaders sought a settlement with Allende until the March 1973 vote. Throughout, the party’s left wing insisted that Chile’s future must be socialist and that the UP and the CDs had to find common ground to move the country in this direction.

In practice, this meant restricting the scope of ongoing expropriations, tamping down on preparations for armed confrontation, and offering explicit assurances of enduring political pluralism and civil rights. If these conditions were met, the party’s left publicly declared its willingness to endorse the government’s reforms.

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A Necessary Risk

Of course, negotiating with the CDs was laden with risks, as the party’s conservatives undeniably wished to use talks to subvert the UP. This was a key reason that left-wing Socialists repudiated any compromise with the CDs.

Negotiating with the Christian Democrats was laden with risks, as the party’s conservatives undeniably wished to use talks to subvert the UP.

Further, those right-wing officials remained dominant within the party. The unwillingness of the Christian Democrats to pursue radical transformations under Frei and its prevailing hard line against Allende had pushed two important sections to defect and join the UP, first in 1969 and again in 1971. However, those breakaway groups, the Popular Unitary Action Movement (MAPU) and the Christian Left, while meaningful politically, lacked extensive mass bases.

By contrast, the wing led by Tomic and founder Renán Fuentealba enjoyed deep influence over the party’s working-class constituencies. It hoped to parlay this potent following into an agreement that could thwart the determination of their right-wing rivals to defeat the UP and Chile’s socialist turn. Although the CD left frequently excoriated the UP left, saving particular scorn for rash Socialists, criticisms were directed more at perceived UP sectarianism than its policies.

The Marxist-Christian alliance with which Tomic’s wing had flirted ahead of the 1970 elections had been frustrated. But the leftmost CDs continued promoting what Tomic called an “institutional and popular” revolutionary unity right up to the eve of the coup.

In short, they pursued a settlement aiming to unite UP and CD mass bases behind a broad consensus in favor of structural reforms. The pact’s institutional dimension involved partisan agreement at the level of governing apparatuses. An expanded popular unity entailed the strategic alignment of their constituents’ demands and collective action.

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Missed Opportunity

The CD left’s proposals dovetailed with Allende’s calls for “negotiating and consolidating” the UP gains. Besides broadening the necessary pro-socialist majority, dialogue offered the chance for hoisting a counterweight to pro-coup CD leaders. Reaching a settlement would have given Tomic something to show for his efforts, thereby upgrading the Left’s standing in the party and rallying his working-class base to an anti-Frei pole.

Dialogue with the Christian Democrat left and an expanded working-class revolutionary alignment offered the UP its only chance for survival.

This intraparty shift, in turn, would likely have pulled the CD away from the increasingly emboldened coup plotters. At the very least, it could have prevented the party from unanimously backing parliament’s August 22 resolution. As a result, the pivotal reunification of modernizing managers and business elites might have been reversed. Allende’s hostility toward the avanzar sin transar directive of the MIR must be understood in this light.

Dialogue with the CD left and an expanded working-class revolutionary alignment offered the UP its only chance for survival. Far from representing a capitulation to elites, Allende’s call for negotiations and consolidation sought to unlock a formula, however unlikely, for a broader “institutional and popular unity” that would salvage the Chilean road to socialism.

Even if the ruling class had proceeded alone, the military would have hesitated. Observers of all political persuasions believe the army was reluctant to intervene without broad CD support, as this would have left the coup and military regime without any popular legitimacy.

Tragically, Allende and his allies were stymied. Hemmed in by the increasing bellicosity of the CD’s right-wing leadership, on one side, and the intransigent agitation of his Socialist comrades, on the other, Allende found himself out of options. The fruitlessness of negotiations diminished the CD left’s standing in the party and its influence over its mass working-class base.

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The Junta’s Triumph

As a result, Frei and the new party head, Patricio Aylwin, who in a cruel twist would become Chile’s first postdictatorship president, emerged more empowered than ever to assert their dominance. It was only then, after prospects for grounding the Chilean road in even wider layers of the working class vanished, that the dichotomous impasse really took hold.

Once in power, however, the junta did not restore the status quo ante. It took total control of the state and society, unleashing a wave of repression that crushed the working class and its organizations and eventually embarking on a radical capitalist transformation.

The key point is that, however constrained, room existed for ongoing UP advances even after the March 1973 elections. The range of possibilities for socialist progress was largely demarcated by CD positioning. And CD decision-making, in turn, pivoted in no small way on how the UP’s strategic approach impacted the party’s relationship with its working-class base as well as its internal disputes.

A strategy that took the array of class forces as set in stone, to be mobilized in their current composition for confrontation, undercut the ability of the CD left to marshal its working-class constituents in favor of socialism. It also hampered the UP’s ability to reach one-quarter of the country’s laboring masses and to favorably shape the outcome of intra-CD rivalries.

By contrast, a strategy that adjusted its tactics to take account of the concerns of all workers would have preserved the chance of keeping wider constituents in the socialist camp. It would have enhanced the UP’s ability to forestall a full CD swing in favor of the coup, and thus hindered elite reunification behind capitalist counterrevolution.

As with the UP’s initial successes, any breakthrough for its survival depended on rooting the political and organizational strategies of the Chilean road to socialism even more deeply in, and among even broader layers of, Chile’s working class. Fifty years later, this remains indispensable in any revived socialist strategy.

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For years, the history of Chile’s Popular Unity government under Salvador Allende has only been accessible through written records and photographs. Thanks to new research, the vibrant and politically engaged music it helped produce is playing online until tomorrow.

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This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile and the tragic end of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. A time for remembrance, it is also an opportunity to explore lesser-known episodes from Chile’s thousand-day experiment in social democratic governance.

One of those episodes, now coming to light, concerns Allende’s efforts to nationalize Chile’s culture industry and create an innovative, democratic mass consumer society. For example, several important studies have recovered the history of Editora Nacional Quimantú. Nationalized by the Popular Unity government, this state-owned publishing house aimed to produce inexpensive editions of great global literature and intellectual works, with the ultimate goal of integrating them into the wider cultural heritage of the working class.

One of the Popular Unity government’s more ambitious projects centered on the nationalization of RCA, the American electronic consumer goods giant. By buying out a controlling share in the company’s stock, Allende believed the company — renamed Industry de Radio y Televisión (IRT) — could manufacture “socialist radios and TVs.” Drawing on the benefits of modern technology, it was believed that these modern consumer technologies — similar to the famous Cybersyn project — could help integrate society into a holistic national project, different from the bourgeois individualism of consumer capitalism.

By far the least studied aspect of the IRT was the state-run record label of the same name. Inherited from the records division of RCA-Victor Chilean, the IRT studios produced and distributed some of the period’s most vibrant and politically engaged music. And yet, for too long, there has been virtually no historical research into the Popular Unity’s efforts to bring music new and old to the masses.

Designer and artist Pablo Castro Zamorano has set out to change that with the website “El Disco es Cultura.” The online radio is currently live, playing the entire discography of IRT nonstop for listeners to enjoy. There’s only one catch: the artistic project comes to an end on September 11, the day of the coup.

Nicolas Allen of Jacobin spoke to Castro Zamorano to get a sense of what inspired him to build the website and to understand why it’s important to not just see and read but also hear the history of the Popular Unity government.

Click here to listen to “El Disco es Cultura.”

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El Disco Es Cultura

Nicolas Allen

How did you come up with the idea for this project?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

As a designer, I have always tried to think of my profession in relation to politics and social protest. Since this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup, I felt it was necessary to do something especially impactful, and I realized that I could make use of this very close, almost genetic connection I have with the IRT, which was the record label that was nationalized by the Popular Unity government.

My father worked at the label, so he provided me with information and is helping me to piece together the history. However, this fifty-year commemorative project, known as El Disco Es Cultura, is really centered on the music that was published by the IRT, rather than the history behind the label.

My father was head of promotion at the label, and he was able to put me in touch with people who helped me to complete the full IRT catalog, and with those records — some rare, others relatively accessible — I created the online radio, which broadcasts the full discography.

Nicolas Allen

If someone went to the website, what could they expect to hear?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

Again, it has the format of an online radio. So, you hit play and start listening to the music that was released by the IRT between 1971 and 1973. There are roughly twenty-two hours of uninterrupted music there to listen to. It’s meant to have the format of an actual radio from that era — as if you were listening to the radio during the Popular Unity years.

I think a present-day listener will be surprised to hear the sounds of that era. So often, our access to the past enters through the eyes, and we assume that photos are the best documentation of what was happening. This project is really about showing what that time in Chile sounded like.

For example, you can hear Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende being interviewed together by a Chilean journalist, sharing different ideas about the revolution. Even if the words from that interview are widely available, their voices and the sound around them are remarkable. It sounds like the interview was recorded in a large courtyard or a big park because you can hear birds singing and children playing in the background. It has a remarkable Edenic quality to it.

This project is really about showing what that time in Chile sounded like. For example, you can hear Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende being interviewed together by a Chilean journalist, sharing different ideas about the revolution.

Nicolas Allen

What about the IRT slogan that you’ve adopted for the site, “El disco es cultura?” What was the significance of saying “records are culture?”

Pablo Castro Zamorano

That phrase was printed on all the records in Chile at that time, generally on the back cover. The idea is pretty transparent: the actual physical record is not just a disposable consumer object for dancing or listening to; it’s also an important cultural artifact. That idea was very present during the IRT. But it wasn’t exclusive to the IRT either. I have seen that same phrase printed on Mexican, Peruvian, and Argentinean records from the 1970s. It seems to have been a global sentiment.

Nicolas Allen

A glance at the catalog shows that the label was recording some of the biggest names in Latin American rock, like Los Jaivas. Was there a unifying aesthetic vision?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

That’s actually a very interesting topic. One of the most striking details about the IRT was that it was so stylistically broad, especially if you compare it with the Chilean Communist Party–associated DICAP label, which mainly produced protest music.

The IRT published música tropical, children’s music, cumbia, and more — there is even an album of experimental computer music. The IRT catalog was extremely diverse, and you can hear that on the online radio: you’ll hear a political speech, then cumbia, then psychedelic rock or funk, and even more experimental electronic music. All that music thrived at the IRT under the Popular Unity government. Julio Numhauser, a famous musician associated with the groups Quilapayún and Amerindios, was the artistic director behind that musical vision.

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Culture for the People

Nicolas Allen

What about the political vision at IRT? Was there a general sense of the public importance of preserving Chile’s musical heritage, or perhaps expanding on that heritage through the exploration of new artistic forms?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

Under the Popular Unity government, several key companies were nationalized for the benefit of the people. And many of those, like the famous Quimantú publishing house, were cultural in nature. The idea there was that books would no longer be an object of elite consumption. The same was the case with the IRT: records could be enjoyed in working-class homes without the connotation of being music connoisseurs or wealthy collectors.

Before that, most records were imported, and the price tag of most records put them out of the reach of popular consumers. The idea was to create a national record industry for domestic consumption. National record production was also vital to the Popular Unity project of nationalizing radio stations, which had been previously dominated by English-language music.

Nicolas Allen

Has your father shared any stories with you about the process of nationalizing RCA-Victor?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

My father was actually working at RCA when the company was nationalized. He just continued working there. He actually tried to tender his resignation, but they wouldn’t accept it and instead said: “You have to continue working here and help us to launch IRT.”

It’s clear that there was a very direct relationship at IRT between the musicians, the sound engineers, and my dad, who was head of promotion. When Los Jaivas came back from exile, my dad was invited to their first concert, because he was a person who had formed an integral part of that community.

In that sense, the IRT was typical of the projects formed by the Popular Unity government, where there was a more horizontal relationship within a company or enterprise. As head of promotion, my father’s job was to go out and sit in a club waiting for hours for the DJ to play Los Jaivas “Todos Juntos.” With its long drum intro and unusual instrumentation, it became an unlikely hit, in part due to his work with IRT.

Under the Popular Unity government, several key companies were nationalized for the benefit of the people. And many of those, like the famous Quimantú publishing house, were cultural in nature.

Nicolas Allen

Was your father political before the experience?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

He was never a member of any party. But he always had a strong sense of social justice and class interests. Although he was never exiled, he lost his job at IRT immediately after September 11, as did everyone else involved with the project. There were all kinds of recording projects underway that suddenly came to a halt. Supposedly, Víctor Jara was working on a new album for IRT, which was never recorded.

I had a relatively sheltered childhood and had no idea that I lived in a country under a dictatorship until I was a teenager and started public education. All that time, the IRT discography remained hidden in our house, and it was almost taboo to talk about it because it obviously referred to a very dark period of history.

Little by little I started to get interested in those discs — both the music and the cover art. I was always attracted to the graphics of the IRT label, which used colors from Chile, but they were always slightly off-red and off-blue, a kind of pink with a light blue. I was very struck by the fact that Chile had a record industry and was publishing these discs, which I had assumed came from the United States or Europe.

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Ending at Ten to Noon, September 11

Nicolas Allen

Weren’t a lot of the IRT masters seized and destroyed during the first days of the Pinochet dictatorship?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

That part of the history requires more research, because, yes, presumedly the masters were destroyed. However, there are stories told by, for example, Eduardo Gatti, of the folk-rock band Los Blops, in which many of the masters were allegedly pulled out of a garbage can. It’s my understanding that recordings of Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro’s speeches were destroyed, along with those of the Uruguayan guerrilla group Los Tupamaros.

Nicolas Allen

And why did you decide that the site has to be shut down on September 11? 

Pablo Castro Zamorano

For me, it’s a form of conceptual closure. The online radio is an artistic project, not an actual radio intended to last in time. But the fact that it is a radio being shut down is conceptually important. On September 11, radio antennas were bombed throughout Santiago in order to cut communication about what was happening. It is also very significant for me that the radio signal was cut off ten minutes before noon.

Nicolas Allen

Is there any disc in particular that represents the history of the IRT?

Pablo Castro Zamorano

There is a very particular story that has to do with the first record published by IRT, marking the first year of Salvador Allende’s government. They commissioned my father to do the cover artwork and asked him to create something that would represent the first year of government.

My father went through press archives and combined photographs that represented the social revolution in Chile: a photo of the mining industry to represent the nationalization of copper; a photo of the Chilean countryside to represent agrarian reform; a photo of the Chilean public state bank; and a photo of some textile workers showing government support for national industry. In the middle, there was a picture of a little one-year-old boy with a bottle of milk, representing a policy implemented by the Popular Unity government to guarantee proper infant nutrition. My father couldn’t find a press clipping for that, so he just took a photo of me as a one-year-old.

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Chile’s socialist leader Salvador Allende became an icon of resistance to oligarchic tyranny after the right-wing coup that began 50 years ago today. His ideas and his sacrifice remain a powerful example for anyone seeking to build a movement for change.

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This September marks fifty years since the violent overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) government sparked widespread interest across the world.

For socialists in Western Europe or North America, Allende’s election showed that revolutionaries could come to power through democratic means, that socialism did not have to mean an end to political pluralism. For those in the socialist and nonaligned world, it was further evidence of a revolutionary tide gathering global strength.

At the same time, Allende’s victory marked the failure of a sustained US-led effort to prevent revolution in Chile. It provoked deep concern and hostility among Latin American elites, as well as in Washington and other Western capitals, where it was feared that the Chilean example might spread to Europe.

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A Constant Presence

As the leader of the Popular Unity alliance, and as a long-standing politician known to revolutionaries and conservatives alike, Salvador Allende was both the face and the beating heart of the Chilean revolution. After his overthrow, the profound symbolism of his choice to die in combat rather than flee into exile ensured that he became a rallying point for a global solidarity movement that marked a generation across the world.

Salvador Allende was both the face and the beating heart of the Chilean revolution.

In Latin America, Allende joined a pantheon of heroes who had struggled against oligarchy as well as Spanish and later US imperialism. Allende’s followers helped carry the torch of revolution to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and far beyond. Meanwhile, in Chile itself, during the dictatorship, Allende became an icon representing the Chilean revolution — for example, in the moments prior to the attempt to kill Pinochet on September 7, 1986, the guerrillas listened to Allende’s last speech before they moved out to their positions.

Today there are streets, squares, sports centers, ports, and parks named after him across the world, including in cities like Havana, Moscow, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City, but also Sheffield, The Hague, Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and many more. Although official recognition of Allende in his own country is scant — a testament to the potency of his political legacy — Chileans voted him the greatest Chilean of the twentieth century in 2008.

In 2019 and 2020, his face was a constant presence in murals and on placards during the mass protests of the “estallido.” In his December 2021 victory speech, Chile’s current president Gabriel Boric paraphrased Allende in an effort to demonstrate his government’s continuity with Allende’s project. Clearly, as the Latin American slogan goes, Allende remains “present” among us fifty years after his death.

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Behind the Myth

However, over time Allende has become a myth and a symbol, obscuring many of the relevant details of his life and activism. Allende became a student leader in the turbulent period leading to the Mussolini-inspired dictatorship of Colonel Carlos Ibañez, and he rose to prominence in the struggle against it.

Over time Salvador Allende has become a myth and a symbol, obscuring many of the relevant details of his life and activism.

He worked in a psychiatric hospital and a morgue, earning his bread by sticking his hands “in pus, cancer, and death,” as he later stated. In a society with an average life expectancy of less than forty years, he wrote a book on the sorry state of Chilean health care.

Allende suffered prison and internal exile, qualified as a doctor, and was a founding member of the Chilean Socialist Party. As part of the Socialist militia, he fought in street battles against fascists during the 1930s. He then became a local leader in Valparaiso, before being elected as parliamentary deputy for the city and serving as health minister under the Popular Front president Pedro Aguirre Cerda.

From his earliest political days, Allende was a friend of the Chilean Communist Party, which he thought was a key part of the Chilean working class. Allende also befriended many Latin American exiles in Santiago, such as the future president of Venezuela, Rómulo Betancourt, and their ideas and experiences flowed into his political vision.

Allende was charismatic, energetic, and extremely self-disciplined, and he worked hard at the craft of mass politics. Allende brought a love of statistics and context into politics, regularly setting up expert circles to help him develop policy that he then translated into popular, easy-to-understand terms. He remained a parliamentary politician until 1970.

Allende traveled widely and had a particular interest in socialist countries, visiting the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Yugoslavia, as well as Cuba. As a political leader, he did not just reflect popular aspirations but fought actively to shape them. For example, nationalization of copper went from being a fringe concern to become a cross-party demand before being unanimously approved by Chile’s Congress.

Allende was elected to the Senate, and eventually became its president in the late 1960s. When criticized, he often pushed back, defending the right to armed struggle against tyranny and highlighting the hypocrisy of his adversaries. Allende led left-wing coalitions in the presidential campaigns of 1952, 1958 (which he narrowly lost), and 1964. He joked that his epitaph would read “here lies the future president of Chile,” before finally being elected president in 1970, as the leader of UP.

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Popular Unity and Its Opponents

In three years, Allende’s government transformed Chile with a massive land reform, the nationalization of key industries and raw materials, and the mass construction of housing. The government expanded education and health care in a way that gave priority to the needs of women and children as the “basic unit” of society.

Allende’s government transformed Chile with a massive land reform, the nationalization of key industries and raw materials, and the mass construction of housing.

UP introduced equal pay and recognized illegitimate children, while also giving workers a new role in the operation and planning of the economy. The government also began providing representation and autonomy for indigenous peoples. In international affairs, Allende’s Chile pursued Latin American integration and engagement with socialist states as part of an independent foreign policy that emphasized ideological pragmatism and noninterference in the affairs of other states.

However, UP did not control Congress, and a political stalemate gradually developed. As storm clouds gathered, Allende sought ways out of the growing crisis — establishing dialogue with the opposition, traveling abroad to marshal support, and striving to achieve unanimity of action among the Chilean left.

Unfortunately, debates on the Left grew increasingly polarized, and the domestic opposition became increasingly intransigent and violent, with support from Washington and other foreign capitals. Outright terrorism, opposition marches and lockouts, and a nonstop hostile media campaign reached a crescendo.

The US stranglehold on the Chilean economy tightened, as the Nixon administration found ways to turn the screws. The dark forces of imperialism and fascism seized the initiative, and eventually they acted through the military to overthrow Allende, unleashing a wave of terror and bloodshed from which Chile has yet to fully recover.

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Allende’s Vision

This is just a brief outline of a long political life. Unlike many political leaders, Allende left no memoirs or political texts. Moreover, he tended to think of theory as “a cold maze,” as he once told Régis Debray. Intellectuals were not his audience, and he was not an ideologue.

Unlike many political leaders, Allende left no memoirs or political texts.

He had neither the time nor the inclination to sit down and elaborate a body of theory. So if we want to understand Allende’s thinking, we need to piece it together from his speeches and his actions. Through this, we can discern a set of ideas and practices that define “Allendismo.”

Allende was a patriot of Chile and of Latin America. For Allende, as for the Chilean Socialist Party, Chile was part of a Latin American whole, and its future lay in the struggle for integration. In this Allende showed the influence of his Peruvian friend Luis Alberto Sánchez, who in turn was a friend and former comrade of Víctor Rául Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui, Latin America’s greatest Marxist.

Allende felt an affinity for Latin American politicians like Colombia’s Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and Guatemala’s presidents Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz — men who also led popular movements for change. He saw himself as part of this broader struggle. The purpose of Allende’s patriotism was to improve the lot of the Chilean and Latin American pueblo, particularly that of women and children, through social, political, economic, and cultural development, and by doing so to illuminate and glorify Chile.

In order to achieve this, he believed, Chile needed political and economic sovereignty. By working to achieve this, Chile would be able to support working-class movements elsewhere, and at the same time, help to liberate the oppressors in each country, including the imperialist core, from the chains forged by their own oppression of others.

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Three Pillars

The counterpart of Allende’s patriotism was his lifelong, ardent anti-imperialism. For Allende, imperialism was centered in the United States, but it had a European subsidiary that acted in concert with it. This Western imperialism confronted the socialist world and suffocated the legitimate democratic and economic aspirations of the world’s poor.

Some of Allende’s friends, such as Venezuela’s Rómulo Betancourt, sought an accommodation with the United States. But even when imperialism used nonviolent methods, Allende decried the effect as being “always domination and arbitrary domination.” There could therefore be no definitive accommodation with imperialism.

On the other hand, while he had critiques of the Soviet Union, throughout his life Allende remained generally positive about its role in the world. His anti-imperialism was not of the “neither Washington nor Moscow” variety. It was this anti-imperialism and his recognition of a broad anti-capitalist movement at a global level that marks Allende’s essential difference from the social democratic tradition.

For Allende, true socialism meant sovereignty, and political and economic democracy. Political democracy meant pluralism, both within and beyond the popular movement.

Above all, Allende was a revolutionary democrat following in the footsteps of his ideological precursor, Luis Emilio Recabarren, the founder of the Chilean Socialist Workers’ Party. While he did not deny the legitimacy of popular violence against tyranny, he thought that in Chile, the popular struggle had created a movement strong enough — and institutions flexible enough — to enable an unarmed transition toward socialism.

For Allende, true socialism meant sovereignty, and political and economic democracy. Political democracy meant pluralism, both within and beyond the popular movement. The popular movement was composed of different historical currents, including socialists, communists, democrats, and radicals, all of which had a role to play in the struggle around a central socialist-communist alliance.

The challenge was to coordinate this movement and build an evolving platform of common demands that would together channel the popular thirst for change. Economic democracy meant the democratic allocation of resources to benefit the people as a whole. Together they precluded economic and political subordination to external forces, or to a domestic elite. These three pillars constitute the core of Allende’s political thought.

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Friends and Enemies

In his political practice, Allende was an undogmatic pragmatist, a man of the people who spent much of his life among them. Although he enjoyed good food, drink, and clothes, and was often accused of being a “toff,” he did not shy away from the worn soles, fleas. and cheap perfumes of the poor.

In his political practice, Allende was an undogmatic pragmatist, a man of the people who spent much of his life among them.

He traveled Chile from north to south, sharing the food and sleeping in the huts of the poor while campaigning, and he dedicated his life to the cause of their emancipation. He probably knew Chile better than any other politician of his time.

In politics, Allende struggled to dislike people, tending to focus his ire on concepts. He understood that people’s actions often differed from their words, and his life shows a consistent effort to build unity among allies, and to educate and correct adversaries rather than destroy them. As a result, he often had good personal relations with conservatives and actors from across the political spectrum, as long as they treated him and the popular movement with respect.

His only true enemies were fascism and imperialism, and their allies in praxis within the Chilean elite. For example, his erstwhile friendship with the political leader of Chilean Christian democracy, Eduardo Frei, only deteriorated when Frei failed to reject the increasingly vile impact of US interference in Chilean politics during the 1960s. In a bitter twist, Frei was later murdered by the dictatorship he had helped into power.

Allende understood the importance of actively defending his persona as a leader of the Left, rising to any challenge that sought to attack his honesty or his political principles. At times, he could seem aggressive by today’s standards, but this approach enabled him to preserve his political status through several decades and in the face of a relentlessly hostile media.

Gaitán’s daughter once told Allende that his life was a road for others to follow. The continued interest in his life, and in the political project of Popular Unity, shows that his ideas, his methods, and his sacrifice remain an example for anyone seeking to build a movement for change.

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Filmmaker Patricio Guzmán and his team documented Chile’s Popular Unity government and the 1973 coup that destroyed it. Smuggled out of the country to be edited in exile, The Battle of Chile is an unforgettable record of an extraordinary historical moment.

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On September 11, 1973, fifty years ago this year, the Chilean military overthrew the Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende with support from the US government. The succeeding military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet would torture over forty thousand people, and more than three thousand were murdered or “disappeared.”

On an international scale, no filmmaker was as crucial to the task of documenting, remembering, and reimagining the first socialist government elected in the Americas and its violent dissolution as documentarian Patricio Guzmán. In 2012, he beautifully summarized his commitment to the memory and memorialization of Chile’s past: “I think that life is memory, everything is memory. There is no present time, and everything in life is remembering. I think memory encompasses all life, and all the mind.”

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A Cinematic Giant

Guzmán is a giant of Latin American documentary cinema with a corpus of more than twenty films. His triptych The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of a People Without Arms (1975, 1977, 1979), about the political conflicts preceding the coup, or golpe, against Allende, is a classic example of what Argentinian filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas christened Third Cinema. This was the Latin American filmmaking movement of the late 1960s and ’70s that sought to use cinema as a weapon to document reality and progressively transform it. From exile in Cuba and Europe, Guzmán continued to document resistance efforts against the Pinochet regime in films like In the Name of God (1987) and excavate the memory of Unidad Popular in Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), The Pinochet Case (2001), and Salvador Allende (2004).

Patricio Guzmán is a giant of Latin American documentary cinema with a corpus of more than twenty films.

More recently, what I would designate as Guzmán’s Chilean “Border Trilogy” demonstrates a deep attunement to the environment and a turn from the politics of the exclusively human to a sense of the political that includes the more than human during this era of mass climate change. The poetic Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button (2015), and The Cordillera of Dreams (2019) are attentive to indigenous cosmovisions and other expansive understandings of both geography and nature in Chile and how they might facilitate a renewed and more holistic understanding of the events around the golpe.

In August of this year, Guzmán was awarded Chile’s National Award for Representational and Audiovisual Arts, becoming the second filmmaker to receive this award after director Raúl Ruiz, another Chilean exile. He also received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Valparaíso. However, Guzmán’s renown in his own country is a novel phenomenon. For decades, he was much better known outside of Chile than within it.

The Chilean public’s inattention to his work was comprehensible, as The Battle of Chile was among those thousand-plus films banned during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Its three sections circulated clandestinely on VHS or Betamax until the return to democracy in 1990. Chile’s La Red channel broadcasted all three sections on Chilean television for the first time as recently as 2021.

Most of Guzmán’s films have now become easily accessible online in Chile through the national streaming service Ondamedia. The vitalization of his work in Chile has also allowed him to gain support there and in France for 2K restorations of The Battle of Chile and his first feature documentary, The First Year (1972) — all of which will begin screening again this year.

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The Early Years

Born in Santiago but raised in Viña del Mar, Guzmán went on to study at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. As a student, he worked as a camera assistant for Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens on the short documentary . . . A Valparaíso (1964). He then pursued other filmmaking opportunities at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and studied directing at the Escuela Oficial de Cine in Madrid.

Guzmán envisioned a career making fiction films, but the political milieu of Allende’s Chile in the 1970s proved too magnetic.

Upon returning from his studies in Madrid, Guzmán envisioned a career making fiction films, but the political milieu of Allende’s Chile in the 1970s proved too magnetic. Guzmán premiered both The First Year and October’s Response in 1972. The First Year, a film that followed the first year of the Allende presidency, made a deep impression upon the esteemed French filmmaker Chris Marker. Marker first viewed the film while in Chile as part of the crew on the Greek director Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972) and would distribute The First Year in Europe.

Guzmán continued to be both increasingly disturbed and inspired by the events in Chile, seeing how the country was effectively in a state of pre–civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, backed by the United States. As he wrote to Marker:

The bourgeoisie will deploy all its resources. It will deploy the bourgeois legal system. It will deploy its own professional organizations together with [Richard] Nixon’s economic power. . . . We must make a film about all this! . . . A wide-ranging piece shot in the factories, the fields, the mines. An investigative film whose grand sets are the cities, the villages, the coast, the desert. A film like a mural, split into chapters, whose protagonists are the people and their union leaders on the one hand, and the oligarchy, its leaders and their connections with the government in Washington on the other. A film of analysis.

Marker offered a crucial fillip to Guzmán’s nascent project Third Year, which became The Battle of Chile, by sending film stock when it was impossible to obtain through normal means due to the US blockade on Chile.

Such support came at a decisive moment as Guzmán had also lost the funding initially offered by Chile Films, which had until recently been led by Miguel Littin (director of the acclaimed El Chacal de Nahueltoro, 1969). This was due to austerity measures taken by the Allende government and the fact that Chile Films had initially contracted Guzmán to make a feature film about the Chilean founding father Manuel Rodríguez. However, Guzmán’s populist vision of Rodríguez in the unfinished film gave him an understanding of the importance of rescuing history from the stranglehold of conservative elites — a project he would develop further in The Battle of Chile.

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El Equipo Tercer Año

Recommitting themselves to the documentary form for a third film, Guzmán and his team, now designated the Equipo Tercer Año (“Third Year Team”), were an eclectic amalgamation of figures. Marta Harnecker, one of the collaborators on the script, was a Chilean political theorist who had studied under Louis Althusser. José Bartolomé, the assistant director, was a Spanish economist, while Jorge Müller Silva was a promising cinematographer with prior filmmaking experiences with Littin and Ruiz.

These team members and a small group of other collaborators, like producer Federico Elton and sound artist Bernando Menz, labored to create a complex Marxist analysis that would function more like a cinematic essay and could communicate to future generations the details of the situation in Chile. The team realized that the film would be an important artifact to promulgate the sacrifices of the Chilean people should a golpe come to pass. But the film crew also truly believed Allende’s forces would prevail in such a scenario; it did not know that the soldiers loyal to the president were already being identified and purged.

The films invite us to engage with the intellectual arguments put forward by a variety of sources.

The team put together an enormous theoretical outline and demarcated the Chilean reality into three categories — ideological, political, and economic. To forge a dialectical vision of the situation in Chile, they traced the critical sites of contestation for the proletariat and the peasants as they attempted to expand their power in the face of increasing violence from the nation’s elites. While the Equipo Tercer Año were capturing the conditions specific to Chile, they grasped that what was happening in Chile foreshadowed situations elsewhere around the world.

The filmmaking cadre captured strikes, protests, demotic speeches, and eventually the golpe itself. The films invite us to engage with the intellectual arguments put forward by a variety of sources, ranging from average Chilean voters after the electoral victory of Unidad Popular to the striking copper workers in El Teniente to labor organizers representing the national Central Única de Trabajadores de Chile on the one hand and regional cordones (workers’ belts) on the other.

The camera-on-the-street approach presents these voices as simultaneously grandiose and myopic. Since the filmmaking team operated with limited resources, they were very frugal in not devoting too much effort to sensuous events. Flamboyant sequences, such as a sequence in the third part with the Chilean folk band Quilapayún that speaks to the important nueva canción movement in Chile, are few and far between.

The team, working in a clandestine manner, also took precautionary measures and worked under different names and titles. As they accumulated footage, only Guzmán and his wife Pamela Urzúa knew where the film reels were stored for security measures.

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Resistance in Exile

When the golpe occurred on September 11, Guzmán was imprisoned in Santiago’s National Stadium for fifteen days. Due to the secrecy with which they had operated, while the military knew that he was a teacher of communication, they were unaware that he was a filmmaker actively working on a project about the golpe as it was unfolding. 

When the golpe occurred on September 11, Guzmán was imprisoned in Santiago’s National Stadium for fifteen days.

After Guzmán’s imprisonment, his wife and team began to send the film out of the country with the support of filmmaker Gastón Ancelovici and the Swedish embassy. At one point, the footage narrowly escaped the military’s searches of Bernando Menz’s apartment, but all the footage eventually made its way safely to Stockholm.

Most of the filmmaking unit went into exile, but the cinematographer Jorge Müller Silva, who was also a member of the militant Movement of the Revolutionary Left, was arrested and disappeared by the junta in 1974. Each of the three films begins with a dedication to his memory.

In exile, Guzmán traveled to France and met with Alfredo Guevara and Saúl Yelín of Cuba’s national film institute, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). With Chris Marker’s support, the ICAIC agreed to support the film’s completion. After his arrival in Havana, Guzmán worked closely with the film’s editor, Pedro Chaskel. Chaskel was a director who had been one of the mentors in experimental filmmaking at the Universidad de Chile for directors like Ruiz and Littin, and he became a leader in the creation of the Chilean Film Archives From the Exile.

Guzmán also received the guidance of the Cuban filmmaker and theorist Julio García Espinosa, one of the founders of the ICAIC. Espinosa’s participation on script edits and as a mentor from the ICAIC were significant. He permitted the team the wide latitude it needed for a project of this scale, and his writings on imperfect cinema had long inspired Guzmán’s team. The Cuban director’s film Third World, Third World War (1970) had also provided a template for The Battle of Chile before they even began filming.

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Activist Cinema

Ultimately, the film took a tripartite, nonlinear structure, with a total length of four and a half hours. The three successive parts were The Insurrection of the Bourgeoise (1975), The Coup d’État (1976), and finally Popular Power (1979). The films are in black and white, shot with a handheld camera. Guzmán and Jorge Müller Silva’s insistence on putting the spectators directly in the middle of moments of crisis involved the expert use of facial close-ups to put laborers, peasants, and common people at the center, rather than elites of the Left or Right.

The trilogy oscillates between the analytic and poetic registers, acting as a participant in a massive social rupture.

The trilogy oscillates between the analytic and poetic registers, acting as a participant in a massive social rupture. It expects viewers to also be active participants in some of the most intellectually demanding documentaries created in the era.

The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie follows the backlash of the middle and upper classes against Unidad Popular and the ways in which members of these classes conspired with foreign interests to pave the way for the golpe. The film opens with footage of the aerial bombardment of Chile’s presidential palace, La Moneda, and then works backward to understand how substantial portions of the Chilean populace could celebrate such violence.

To accomplish this task, the film switches back and forth between interviews with supporters for Unidad Popular and the opposition, principally the Christian Democrats, but also fascist groups like the Fatherland and Liberty Nationalist Front. The denouement of the first film is shocking and presents the murder of photojournalist Leonardo Henrichsen as he filmed his own death during the first failed golpe that occurred in June of 1973.

The Coup d’État follows the complexity and conflicts between the various groups on the Left. These various factions can’t seem to agree upon how to best protect the gains made by Unidad Popular. Ultimately, these debates do not secure a firm defense plan against the military’s subversion.

The film’s coda contains footage from Allende’s final address before his death and the military junta’s subsequent televised proclamation of their power and denunciation of the “Marxist cancer” in the Allende government. Yet even as Guzmán shows us Allende supporters being arrested by the military, he is firm that the battle for Chile is far from finished.

The third part, Popular Power, focuses on the organizing that took place among Chilean workers from 1972 to 1973 as they sought to further socialist projects including the occupation of factories and of agricultural territories. The attempts at solidarity by local communities to distribute food and other important commodities during the time of mass scarcity is a central motif of the film. The workers consistently understand the urgency of the moment even as the Allende government remains reluctant to act.

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An Imaginary Country

Guzmán’s latest film, 2022’s My Imaginary Country, is a poetic continuation of The Battle of Chile in which Guzmán tracks the aftermath of the 2019 estallido social, the massive nationwide protests that demanded an end to a variety of inequalities in Chile and a new constitution that would finally leave the 1980 Pinochet-era document in the past.

The battle for Chile — what it was, is, and remembers itself to be — continues.

While such events prompted hopeful statements from Guzmán himself — “Chile has found its memory. The event that I have waited for since my years as a student have finally happened” — the aftermath of the estallido social has been more ambiguous. In 2022, Chileans rejected perhaps the most progressive constitution ever drafted in the Americas by a substantial margin.

In late August of this year, President Gabriel Boric authorized a new search plan to locate the remains of the thousand-plus disappeared Chileans whose remains are still missing. In addition, Chile’s Supreme Court finally charged seven soldiers for the murder of folk singer Víctor Jara in the National Stadium after the golpe. As many in the country mourned the passing of Guillermo Teillier, who led the military resistance of the Communist Party in Chile during the dictatorship and served as the party’s president from 2005 to 2023, Boric praised the dignity of Teillier’s life and passing while labeling the suicide of Hernán Chacón Soto, one of Jara’s murderers, as an act of cowardice to avoid justice.

Such contemporary events remind us that the battle for Chile — what it was, is, and remembers itself to be — continues. For those seeking to understand the rules of engagement in that battle, there can be no better starting point than to return to the corpus of Patricio Guzmán, one of the most politically resolute filmmakers to ever take up the camera — a camera that he has transformed into a tool of poetry and memory in the ongoing fight against fascism.

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During the late 1960s, two leftist Argentine filmmakers wrote a manifesto that called for a new type of filmmaking known as “Third Cinema.” This movement led to the creation of some of the most radical and anti-colonial films in the history of cinema.

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Barbie is a radical takedown of not only the patriarchy, but the conventions of cinema itself. Or it’s a movie-length commercial sweetened with pseudofeminist platitudes. Oppenheimer is a scathing indictment of a tortured genius whose amoral personal ambition left nothing but destruction in its wake. Or it’s a shiny canonization of the man behind one of history’s greatest atrocities.

The battle over the politics of the latest blockbusters exploded weeks before release. Like Oppenheimer’s unobserved quantum particles, movies in the Twitter era exist simultaneously in antithetical states; both revolutionary and reactionary, woke and problematic. Onto every film, an exaggerated image of one’s own position — or one’s enemies — can be projected.

Criticizing the politics of mass media is undoubtedly a worthwhile project. But in the sea of overbaked culture war discourse, it’s easy to lose sight of land. What should the anti-capitalist moviegoer look for on the horizon? What is the North Star of leftist film?

In the time of superhero franchises and Disney remakes, “eat the rich” Oscar winners and Adam McKay message movies, the Left would do well to consider how we assess the politics of film, and what an alternative, truly radical form of filmmaking might look like. There’s no better place to start than Third Cinema.

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Third Cinema in Theory

In October 1969, the Tricontinental magazine ran an article by two young Argentine filmmakers, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, titled “Toward a Third Cinema.” The twenty-page piece would become something of a manifesto, articulating the theory behind a nascent cinematic movement, and inspiring an approach to political filmmaking that lives on over fifty years later.

“Toward a Third Cinema” posits that most films, up until that point, could be classified as one of two categories. First Cinema was the cinema of Hollywood — corporate-produced movies, designed above all to entertain (and thereby make a profit). Think Golden Age Hollywood musicals or Marvel movies. Though First Cinema demonstrated the potential of film as a medium to reach mass audiences, it had no radical intent.

Second Cinema, on the other hand, is more often auteur-driven and experimental, concerned primarily with artistic expression. In many ways, Second Cinema marks a political step forward from First, pushing the boundaries of the medium in pursuit of loftier goals than mere spectacle. But according to Getino and Solanas, its political potential nevertheless remained limited by the commercial imperative. At worst, Second Cinema could become navel-gazing and individualist. At best, it testified to the existence of injustice and the suffering of the working class, but it remained divorced from a sophisticated critique of the material relations that produce such suffering, and their alternatives.

Recognizing both the strengths and limits of these two forms, Getino and Solanas proposed a Third Cinema, explicitly concerned with using the power of film to educate and agitate the masses toward class struggle and national liberation. Seemingly influenced by the work of early Soviet cinema, the thought of philosopher-educator Paulo Freire, and, perhaps most of all, theorist-playwright Bertolt Brecht, Getino and Solanas decried how Argentina’s film industry was “set up to accept and justify dependence, the origin of all underdevelopment.” Instead, they urged the development of a cinema designed to advance its audience’s anti-imperialist class consciousness.

As they put it:

The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognises in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point — in a word, the decolonisation of culture.

Getino and Solanas rejected a simplistic belief in the power of art or language to unilaterally change the world. Rather, they understood culture as just one site of contestation. Cultural production was one powerful tool with the potential to interact, dialectically, with material conditions to further the real struggle for Third World liberation.

In Political Film, scholar Mike Wayne identifies four key elements by which Third Cinema seeks to achieve these goals: historicity — the film situates itself in history, understood as “process, change, contradiction, and conflict”; politicization — the film explores “the process whereby people who have been oppressed and exploited become conscious of that condition and determine to do something about it”; critical commitment — while no artistic work is detached from ideology, Third Cinema embraces its critical perspective; and cultural specificity — the film grounds itself in its audience’s particular cultural context.

Perhaps the clearest expression of this approach is Getino and Solanas’s own La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), made in 1968. The film combines original and archival documentary footage to create a four-hour treatise on Argentina — its colonial past, its neocolonial present, its class composition, and, not least, the necessity of struggle for its liberation.

Though occasionally drifting into a more standard documentary format, La Hora de los Hornos is at its best when Getino and Solanas are playing with the form, almost tangibly experimenting with the power of cinema to educate and engage. The film opens to pounding drums, barraging the viewer with images of social conflict — protests, police brutality, guerilla warfare — intercut with title cards proclaiming slogans like “LIBERACIÓN” and “A common past. A common enemy. A common possibility.” In a later sequence, gruesome footage of a slaughterhouse is montaged with advertisements and intertitles describing, for example, the percentage of Argentina’s mineral wealth that is owned by foreign corporations.

To Getino and Solanas, Third Cinema was not just defined by its content and form, but also its method of production and distribution. The two cofounded the Grupo Cine Liberación, which built democratic control and workers’ ownership into the filmmaking process. Operating under the shadow of dictatorship, and seeking to minimize any financial obligations that might undermine their politics, the collective relied on “guerrilla filmmaking” — small crews operating on shoestring budgets, and often outside of the law.

Distribution fit a similar pattern. Banned in multiple countries, La Hora de los Hornos was typically shown by radical political organizations in underground screenings accompanied by intensive sessions of dialogue and debate. Not every Third Cinema filmmaker would meet the strict production and distribution standards outlined by Getino and Solanas, but the critique of capitalist cultural production and spirit of rigorous audience engagement that they embodied was nonetheless formative to Third Cinema’s development.

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Third Cinema in Practice

While Getino and Solanas coined the term, Third Cinema is by no means theirs alone. Brazilian director Glauber Rocha’s “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” published four years earlier, and Cuban theorist-director Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema” were similarly influential essays on the political potential of film. But more important than any written theory are the films themselves.

Third Cinema takes many forms. La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas (The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of an Unarmed People) by Patricio Guzmán uses documentary footage to track the reactionary backlash to Salvador Allende’s presidency. Jorge Sanjinés’s Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor) is a drama based on an alleged true story of a Quechua community discovering that their women have been forcibly sterilized by the US Peace Corps. Kidlat Tahimik’s whimsical, often-droll Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) follows a US-obsessed Philippine jeepney driver (and Wernher von Braun mega-fan) in his journey of disillusionment from the West.

Many Third Cinema films explicitly portray the fight for national political independence; set in 1961 Angola, Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga is about a woman’s journey to free her imprisoned, militant husband, who was part of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola. Others, like “father” of African cinema Ousmane Sembène — who famously declared “Europe is not my center” — just as often set their sights on the postcolonial, comprador bourgeoisie. His Xala, for example, tells the story of a corrupt Senegalese businessman cursed with impotence — both political and sexual.

While unapologetic in its political stance, Third Cinema does not shy away from nuance or complexity. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) depicts the Cuban bourgeoisie as unmoored and disaffected in a country that has moved on without them, presenting, as one critic put it, an “empathetic portrait of an unsympathetic man.”

Though Third Cinema is generally made by artists from the Third World, it is not necessarily so. Italian Gillo Pontecorvo’s neorealist masterpiece La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) is often included in the canon, along with his lesser-known Queimada (Burn!). Nor is the label limited to feature films. The twnety-seven-minute Agarrando Pueblo (Vampires of Poverty) from Colombia’s Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina, for example, begins as an effective if unremarkable satire of poverty porn, but transforms into something altogether more powerful when the narrative is dropped to allow one actor — an actual resident of the depicted slum, it turns out — to break the fourth wall and articulate his opinions on the filmmaking process directly to the camera.

Third Cinema as a wave grew and, ultimately, ebbed alongside the Third World movement. But it was not consigned entirely to the past. Twenty years after his Touki Bouki, a Third Cinema classic, Djibril Diop Mambéty made Hyènes (Hyenas), an allegory for the arrival of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) onto the African continent, and the willingness of some to sacrifice everything for a share of promised riches. In 2006’s Bamako, by Mauritanian-Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, the people of Africa put the IMF and World Bank on trial for their crimes against the continent in the courtyard of a Malian family’s house. As the hearing unfolds, other members of the household watch a film-within-a-film in which a band of American cowboys goes on a shooting spree in Timbuktu; “Two teachers, that’s too many,” says one, before firing.

Spanning decades, continents, and genres, from the films that inspired Getino and Solanas to their descendents today, Third Cinema is less a singular movement than it is a shared approach — a common commitment — to using the power of cinema to advance the project of Third World liberation.

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Third Cinema, Then and Now

Third Cinema is not beyond reproach. Despite the bombast of its claims, it has remained culturally marginal. Though it has sought a mass audience, the demands that it places on its audience have nonetheless disengaged or even alienated many viewers.

Nor, of course, does Third Cinema have sole claim to political film. From the Soviet masters to Bong Joon-ho, through vast movements of radical black, feminist, and queer cinema, film has been used as a vehicle for social change since the very inception of the medium.

But Third Cinema’s contributions to the history of political filmmaking — as a concerted attempt to manifest radical politics from production to consumption to distribution — are enormous. Where some films tap into righteous anger to exploit and assuage it, Third Cinema channels it. Moving beyond superficial lamentations on the state of the world, Third Cinema articulates a substantive critique of the capitalist, imperialist system. Rather than existing merely for profits, Third Cinema’s entire raison d’être is to develop class consciousness and contribute culturally to material anti-imperialist struggle.

Getino and Solanas conclude their manifesto by claiming that “the birth of a third cinema means, at least for us, the most important revolutionary artistic event of our times.” Though their claim may sound dramatic in retrospect, it came at a moment when Third World politics seemed poised to reshape global relations. The world of 2023 is assuredly different from that of 1969, but the fundamental objective of Third Cinema — decolonization — is no less urgent.

Not every movie needs to subscribe to Third Cinema’s standards in order to be politically impactful, much less artistically valuable. Barbie and Oppenheimer can be watched and enjoyed, criticized, condemned, or valorized, without reservation. But amid the confused and hyperbolic discourse that now inevitably accompanies each major release, the enduring legacy of one of cinema’s most influential political movements offers terra firma. Third Cinema is a reminder of the medium’s radical potential.

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It is now common knowledge that whenever protest movements could make political gains through digital media and technologies, the regimes these very movements seek to challenge would catch up with their progress.  From the 2010-2011 Arab Spring to popular contestations of Southeast Asia’s autocracies in 2020-2021, optimism regarding digital activism has been met with regime adoption of digital repression. ¹ This development has reinforced ‘digital authoritarianism’ in the region. ²

Digital arsenals to suppress dissent have multiplied and diversified over the past decades, following disruptive mass mobilizations that challenged the status quo in countries such as Cambodia (2013), Malaysia (2015-16), Myanmar (2021-present), Thailand (2020-21) and Indonesia (2020). In long-standing autocracies like Vietnam in which the Internet is a potential regime destabilizer, stringent cyber laws and information manipulation through cyber troops enable ruling elites to tighten their grip on the population. ³ While domestic factors are key drivers, there is reason to believe that governments in Southeast Asia‘cross-learn’ tactics of digital repression and inspire one another. ⁴

Digital repression encompasses various methods of social control to preemptively deter and lower the impact of protest movements. Digital repression toolkits include Internet filtering, surveillance via high-tech spyware ⁵ and social media monitoring, state-aligned misinformation online, ⁶ prosecution of activists through cyber- or information-related laws, ⁷ and Internet shutdowns. ⁸ These can help governments achieve the goal of control, in many cases, without resorting to armed clampdown of challengers.

Governments in the region possess varying degrees of digital capacities, leading to their different tactical preferences.  Based on the 2019 Digital Society Project data, the most oft-used form of digital repression in Singapore and Vietnam is prosecuting online users, while in Cambodia, it is Internet filtering. In Malaysia and Thailand, social media monitoring was the most common trend. The two remaining electoral democracies – Indonesia and the Philippines – lean toward misinformation campaigns. Myanmar seems to be the only one among its autocratic counterparts that most frequently relies on Internet shutdowns.

Figure 1
Digital repression scores in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam

Most burgeoning studies and civil society reports tend to analyze the contour of an individual repertoire of digital repression. My ongoing research in Thailand, however, tells a different story. Repressive toolkits work in tandem, in an ecosystem; the operation of one repertoire complements the others. This is the case at least in Thailand. Its military-monarchy-backed regime has created the legal-bureaucratic infrastructure necessary for effective controls of digital space since the 2006 coup. The most crucial instrument is the 2007 Computer-related Crimes Act (CCA, amended from 2016 on), which does not only penalize those creating and/or sharing online content deemed ‘forged’ or ‘false’ that may cause public panic or threaten national security. ⁹ But it also gives a pretext for surveillance practices and developing relevant skills and technologies. This ecosystem of digital repression entails the interplay of online content filtering, digital surveillance, legal persecution of online users, and Information Operations (IO).

Notably, digital surveillance through social media monitoring and the use of snooping devices provides essential intelligence for the authorities to implement other tactics. Cyber units of the police, the army, and royalist civic groups would monitor social media feeds, at times using artificial intelligence-powered tools. They would flag content deemed to offend the monarchy or violate the CCA for lawsuits. In the aftermath of the 2020-2021 protests that, among others, demanded the monarchy reform, digital surveillance has intensified, involving the deployment of spyware like Pegasus that requires no malware or phishing links to infect targeted devices. This has reportedly offered the authorities exclusive information into the Thai protest movements, especially regarding their internal dynamics, plans for future activities, financial routes and supporters, and specific roles of activists that are normally kept confidential. For activists, the information has prompted preemptive crowd controls and most importantly arrests of activists. ¹⁰

A telling case is the activist P (alias) whose mobile phone was repeatedly attacked by Pegasus. Her name appears on a bank account that received public donations for the 2020 protest activities. On 17 September 2021, cyber police raided her apartment and charged her with Article 116 (sedition) and CCA. She believed that the arrest was also due to her additional role in the movement, which she believed was not public knowledge. She was accused of running the movement’s Facebook page. P is puzzled by the authorities’ insights into this role because she had kept it a secret and never used a personal account to operate the group’s official account. ¹¹

Moreover, the information gained from social media monitoring and possibly surveillance tools could make online smear campaigns increasingly targeted. Through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, cyber units related to security agencies and royalist civic groups have painted the 2020-2021 protesters as ‘nation-haters’ and ‘foreign lackeys’. ¹² What is more, exclusive insights into, for instance, the financial avenues of protesters or their internal disputes, have recently sharpened messages of IOs attacking movement leaders as lacking transparency at best and having a moral deficit at worst. Such allegations could worsen movement fragmentation, a persistent challenge that has hindered the substantive advancement of its campaigns. ¹³

Lastly, online smear campaigns are closely intertwined with charges against activists. Those involved in these campaigns simultaneously file lawsuits against activists accused of undermining the monarchy. Throughout 2020 and 2021, smear campaigns on social media often interpreted activists’ demands vis-à-vis the current government and/or the monarchy as a threat to the nation and its pillars. These messages stigmatize activists and often give ground to those determined to defend the nation to take action. ¹⁴ Online stigmatization has sometimes led to physical attacks on activists, as evident in the case of Ja New in 2019. But lately, it has encouraged royalist activists, who want to do good deeds for the nation, to press charges against leading and rank-and-file dissidents for breaching Article 112 (offending the monarchy). A case in point is the Thailand Help Center for Cyber Bullying Victims (THCVC) whose members were trained to file an Article 112 complaint and have received evidence  for lawsuits from the private chat group. These royalist activists deliberately file complaints at a provincial police station far from the accused’s residences to create extra hurdles such as travel costs and time spent on the trips. ¹⁵ Between November 2020 and November 2022, there have been 239 cases of Article 112. Of this number, ‘ordinary citizens’, including members of the THCVC and the royalist Thai Bhakdi, filed 109 complaints. ¹⁶

So far, it remains difficult to assess the detrimental impact of digital repression on protest campaigns in Thailand specifically and Southeast Asia generally. What studies in repression and social movements can tell us is that digital repression contributes to disrupting and disorienting movements’ public communication and strategies of mass mobilization. In addition, the prosecution of digital activists can deplete their limited resources – be it time, money, and energy – by forcing them to fight in countless court cases. ¹⁷ This together with digital surveillance and online smear campaigns can take a toll on activists’ wellbeing and private lives. Some dissidents I interviewed told anecdotes of fear, exhaustion, and anxiety from being spied on, charged, and demonized for doing what they believe is for Thailand’s better future. Few of them, especially rank-and-file supporters became discouraged from partaking in protests. Ultimately, the repression has raised the costs of mass mobilization, particularly in the digital space. The prospect of countering its long-term effects remains dimmed.

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri
Assistant Professor and Project Leader
Monitoring Centre on Organised Violence Events, Thailand

The post Digital repression of protest movements: #WhatshappeninginSoutheastAsia appeared first on Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci left behind a rich and complicated legacy of thought on socialist strategy for transforming the world. Historian Michael Denning guides us through the great — and misunderstood — thinker.

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Few thinkers on the Left loom as large as Antonio Gramsci. He’s cited often by a wide range of thinkers for a wide range of purposes, but few actually bother to take the time to really read and wrestle with the Italian communist, especially in his historical context.

For the Jacobin podcast the Dig, Daniel Denvir spoke at length about Gramsci and the relevance of his legacy today with Yale historian Michael Denning. This is the second installment of a two-part conversation with Denning on Gramsci; you can read part one here, listen to part one here, and listen to part two here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Daniel Denvir

Let’s return to the concept of hegemony. Gramsci was drawing on Lenin’s concept of hegemony, which Lenin had used to describe how communists could exercise power in a country where industrial workers were only a very small minority.

How did Gramsci remake hegemony into a more general concept to describe how any social group governs or might seek to govern? How does this theory of hegemony taking off from Lenin allow us to both understand what sort of social forces dominate at present, and also what sort of politics might be capable of overthrowing and supplanting them?

Michael Denning

The relation between Gramsci and Lenin is an interesting one. Gramsci says two things regarding hegemony about Lenin. One is that Lenin’s idea of hegemony was a philosophical as well as a political advance. Two, he says that that moment is the moment when Lenin is pushing for the strategy of the United Front, which Gramsci himself will then hold onto for a number of years, and he sets it against various notions of immediate insurrection, which other members of the Communist International at that point are calling for. Gramsci already feels, as a result of the defeats after 1919 and 1920, that it is a moment for neither a kind of pure working-class base nor a kind of insurrectionist politics, and that he’s already imagining some new form of united front in order to oppose fascism.

This idea is not just a political strategy, but a philosophical concept. Gramsci says at various points that the central issue, the kind of the cell of political thought, is the question of rulers and ruled. He says that this is not the case of human nature. It’s not that there always are leaders and led. How does one want to develop leaders in a situation where one wants to create a society that is not divided among leaders and led?

So the notion of hegemony emerges out of theorizing how leaders should lead, how a party should lead, how the leaders in a party should lead. And there are three stages. Moving from the economic corporate moment to the hegemonic moment is a move from where one stands together with other people because they share the same economic position or status as oneself. His example is one tradesman standing next to another tradesman, one businessman standing next to other businesspeople, to a notion where a political organization would not be just people standing next to each other according to their self-interest but would have a wider vision of a new conception of the world, a new society, a new way of organizing things.

For him, that hegemonic moment is when some organized political group, led by organizers, would actually be able to enunciate such a position and win consent from other allies to that position. He says sometimes that that actually might mean sacrificing some of one’s own self-interest in order to give stuff to your allies, in order to build a wider movement.

Using the example of late tsarist Russia and early Soviet Russia: precisely because the rural peasant population is so huge, any movement built out of industrial workers and trade unions would actually have to make concessions to the peasantry in order to win it over. This was an issue that Gramsci was clearly interested in, because Italy was a country with a large southern region of rural agricultural peasant populations, tenant farmers, day laborers.

That question remains a question in any kind of politics: what are the trade-offs that a political organization is willing to make, not with its enemies necessarily? It’s not that one is trying to win over one’s enemies; it’s about building alliances with one’s allies.

Gramsci always goes back and forth between current political examples and past historical examples, and he will go back to past examples in Italian history to show how certain groups had actually been so interested in their own self-interest that they never actually presented a hegemonic strategy and won over allies, and were as a result unsuccessful.

What are the trade-offs a political organization is willing to make?

For him, that will be a matter of the differences between trade union strategies and a party strategy. If a trade union strategy will always be defined by members’ interests, either in the particular local or the other people who are members of that union or that craft, a political party must bring together not only workers from a whole variety of different kinds of occupations and sectors of society, but people who are outside the working population, unemployed people.

The other phrase that he’ll use a few times is “hegemonic apparatus” or “apparatuses of hegemony.” That is the idea that organizers and intellectuals and legislators and party militants actually create educational, cultural newspapers. A number of times, he says things like, a newspaper can be a party itself. He says that the Times of London in England is a political party. One might actually think of the New York Times as a kind of political party. Those apparatuses of hegemony are kind of the vehicles and instruments through which this wider conception of the world can be exercised.

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Politics and “Organic Intellectuals”

Daniel Denvir

Gramsci writes, “Since all men are political beings, all are also legislators. Every man in as much as he is active, i.e. living, contributes to modifying the social environment in which he develops.” Relatedly, he argues, “All men are philosophers.” In making this argument that everyone is a legislator, Gramsci is asserting that power is not specific to the state, but something generalized in all sorts of different ways throughout society — from the state, of course, but also to the workplace, the home, everywhere.

That seems like a major critique of prevailing ideas of what politics is. It’s not something concentrated among a select group of leaders, nothing exclusively organized around the state. What are the full implications of what Gramsci is saying here? What does it suggest about how to think about the scope of socialist politics? And then how does it relate to his classic formulation of what he calls organic intellectuals?

Michael Denning

One way of trying to put together Gramsci’s thought is to think about those two halves, that sense that everyone is a philosopher and that everyone is a legislator, as two halves of his grand project, of his way of thinking about the world. Everyone is a philosopher and everyone is an intellectual, but that comes with the proviso that in the social division of labor, some people have the role of intellectuals. Some people, that’s their job. Other people actually nonetheless exercise intellectual thought in their daily life.

He’ll have almost exactly the same argument about how everyone is a legislator. There are indeed professional legislators. There are people who are professional politicians, and he does not dismiss them. On the other hand, politics is not limited to those people. In some sense, everyone is a legislator. In that other sense, he says, the scope of your legislation is different depending who you are. If you’re in the national legislature, you have a very different scope than if you were on the city council. If you’re on the city council, you have a very different scope than if you’re in a department meeting.

But even in the department, in a university, you legislate in a certain sense by setting norms of conduct, setting syllabi, setting curricula, setting exams. Gramsci says that everyone can be coercive. You can give out negative grades in the classroom, for example. In various forms in your day-to-day life and work, you are actually setting norms of conduct and policing the norms of conduct of the people around you.

He actually goes on to say, even if you only follow orders, if you actually only exercise those norms of conduct, you are in that way legislating — if you stop at the red light or stop sign. You don’t have the same power as the people who put the stop sign at that junction. But that is part of the legislation of daily life. That’s a very powerful and rich way of thinking about political action.

That struggle between leaders and led, between the leaders and the subaltern, is one of the ways this is structured. Gramsci will say that it’s often disguised, because what is a relation of authority and power is said to be merely a technical one. Various structures of authority appear to be about lifting up someone who’s more expert, has more authority, but actually may simply be a way in which somebody can boss someone else, despite there being no real difference in skills or knowledge.

This puts politics right into the workplace. Gramsci writes, “Hegemony is born in the factory,” which has often been taken too reductively. But the general sense is that leadership is born in the norms of conduct in workplaces and all kinds of workplaces.

As to the organic intellectual: in English, we tend to divide a set of words called organic, an organism, from organizer and organization. In a way, that one set of words seems to have a kind of biological nature, and the other requires a more mechanistic nature. That actually isn’t so in Italian, so that an organism and an organization are not two, one biological and one mechanical, but actually a similar set of words.

So an organic intellectual in Gramsci’s sense is not somebody who has roots in a particular world. It is someone who organizes. In that, one could actually see “organizer” and “intellectual” as synonyms.

So an organic intellectual in Gramsci’s sense is not somebody who has roots in a particular world. It is someone who organizes.

He is very interested in the social groups that one comes out of. He often suggests that the organizing intellectuals of the working class are people who come out of working-class communities. But their job is an organizer of a trade union, or a shop steward, or an organizer of a political party. And you can tell that because in fact, his organizers of the capitalist class are not people who are born into the capitalist class. His examples are advertisers, financiers, managerial people. People who organize the daily work of capitalist businesses are the organic intellectuals of the capitalist class.

Though Gramsci never uses this phrase, I think one could imagine a notion of organic legislators, people who are the organizers in various forms of daily life and work or engage in social movements (rather than extend to everyone the notion of being an organic intellectual). One might imagine a dichotomy between organic intellectuals, organizing cultural and intellectual and educational life on the one hand, and organic legislators on the other. If the one is dealing with concepts of the world in his phrase, the other is dealing with norms of conduct.

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Mass Culture

Daniel Denvir

Gramsci also writes, “But innovation cannot come from the mass, at least at the beginning, except through the mediation of an elite for whom the conception implicit in human activity has already become, to a certain degree, a coherent and systematic, ever present awareness in a precise and decisive will.”

What does this elucidate about Gramsci’s conception of the world-making power inherent in every person? And how does that relate to his assertion here that that major ideological transition seemed to require an organized leadership outside of the masses’ everyday life and argument?

Michael Denning

I would have two answers. One is about the specific historic conditions of Gramsci’s world and Gramsci’s moment in history. Remember that during this period from, say, the 1860s to the 1930s, there is an extraordinary migration around the world of people from rural, agricultural, and peasant worlds into the new industrial factories that are taking off. This is the era of Fordism. In many ways, Gramsci is a Marxist of the Fordist era. Marx was a Marxist of the pre-Fordist era. We are living in a post-Fordist era.

Everything that Gramsci indicates in his critique of political science is that elite theories that say the elite will always be with you are totally wrong. I think he’s thinking in a very specific moment where a certain new population has to be educated, has to be brought into political action. A parallel figure of someone slightly younger who lived the other side of that, the great Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, writes in the 1940s and 1950s about how the ordinary worker of that era is more advanced in their conception of the world than Hegel and Kant were, precisely because of the advent of mass literacy and the new kinds of work that people did in the 1940s and 1950s.

Gramsci is in a world where what we think of as mass culture does not yet exist. There is the early bit of film, there’s a bit of radio. He’s very interesting when he’s writing about mass serial novels or whatever, but the kind of industries of popular storytelling and popular sharing of experiences that are so fundamental to the post-1940 world are really not the world of Gramsci. Gramsci, whenever he is looking at the changing of popular mentalities, will look at the Catholic Church for his examples to model his new organizer, his new party. He’s saying, “Wow, look at how successful the Catholic Church has been. If someone wants a new conception of the world, imagine it this way.”

For leftists to think about the ways that religious organizations have created new conceptions of the world and sustain them over generations is really powerful. On the other hand, there is a moment where you feel that Gramsci, unlike Marxists even of a generation later, is not really aware yet of the difference that film and radio broadcasting and mass culture, mass spectator sports are going to make.

Daniel Denvir

How does Gramsci’s conception here compare to that of Robert Michels, a leading thinker among the Italian elite theorists? Michels argues that by its very nature, the hierarchy inherent to organization and the divide, the corresponding divide between leaders and led, inherently leads to what he calls the “iron law of oligarchy” and an inherent tendency within organizations and parties toward top-down rule. Michels starts as a communist, I believe, or a socialist and ends up a fascist.

Michael Denning

Gramsci is aware of two different trends, one extremely pessimistic and the other curiously optimistic.

On the one hand is a pessimistic political science that is really being invented at this time — Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca. This remains an important tradition in political science to this day, which basically sees elites as necessary, that democracy is nothing more than the circulation of elites. Participatory democracy is not possible.

On the other hand, Gramsci’s also facing what one could think of as the optimistic side of management theory, from Frederick Winslow Taylor and a number of thinkers from the 1910s and 1920s. American thinkers are actually thinking that we can develop a management science that can make workers happy with their work and make the workplace not only more technically efficient, but also one that would respond to workers’ emotional and psychological needs.

Gramsci actually wants a kind of radical democratic organization theory that is on neither side. He was thinking that indeed one could build parties and leaders that can get to a world beyond the leaders/led divide, and that one could also create workplaces that can get beyond having bosses and workers, where the production could be controlled by those who are doing it.

Gramsci was thinking that indeed one could build parties and leaders that can get to a world beyond the leaders/led divide, and that one could also create workplaces that can get beyond having bosses and workers.

Daniel Denvir

One way maybe to get at this difference between Gramsci and Michels is in Gramsci’s analysis of the structure of political parties or political organization more generally. He identifies three critical segments. First, the mass element. Second, the principal cohesive leadership element. And third, an intermediate element “which articulates the first element with the second and maintains contact between them not only physically, but also morally and intellectually.”

Explain these components and particularly how Gramsci saw them cohering through an intermediary, cadre layer. Why is this intermediate layer so critical to organization?

Michael Denning

Because the intermediate layer is the one that is the most interesting and the least clear. For Gramsci, it was indeed the parish priests and the parish nuns. Those were the people who day-to-day actually were the intermediaries between the popes and the theologians and the bishops — who were making the big organizational decisions in the church — and the church’s faithful. What he saw his own party needing to do was to create a huge number of parish priests and nuns to be not the rank and file, but intermediaries.

He saw it in some ways in the Italian Socialist Party. He wasn’t really out there running for office in those years. He was very active in the Casa del Popolo or the People’s House, which was a building at which journals were housed, and night schools and party meetings took place. It was a kind of center for the neighborhood. He gave lectures there. He was writing and editing newspapers. He saw that as part of that intermediate stratus.

Remember, the Italian Communist Party is founded in 1921, Gramsci is imprisoned in 1926. There’s only about five years when he is a leader of this new party and where he is actually creating this set of intermediaries in the face of fascism.

Gramsci is trying to imagine a part of his party that doesn’t yet exist and that won’t exist for the most part under fascism, and doesn’t really come into play until after World War II. One of the reasons for Gramsci’s historical importance in Italy, where Gramsci’s ideas about this will be fundamental, is that in the postwar decades the Italian Communist Party became a major political force electorally, in cultural institutions, in educational institutions, for half a century.

Also, Gramsci’s pamphlet writings were written to train party militants. He’s very interested in having a school, because he saw that the Left was growing and gaining a whole set of new people who are joining organizations, joining movements, who don’t have all of the history and knowledge about the Left. How do you bring people up to speed? How do you train a new generation?

It’s not so much a sense that something has to come from the outside or that people have to be moved from a reformist to a revolutionary mode. It’s rather that every political organization has a whole sense of experience, both good and bad, of victory and defeat. Yale graduate teachers recently won their union recognition election. Of those voting, 91 percent voted for the union, after thirty years of struggling for a union and thirty years of multiple generations of graduate teachers who have come in, spent a few years, worked hard for that union, passed on, left and whatever.

Gramsci is quite clear: there is no education without educators. There’s no organization without organizers.

Those organizers tried to both pass on the history of what succeeded and what failed, and to bring into membership people who had just arrived. Remember, one of the striking things about any union thing is that you don’t get to pick your members. So how do you build workplace solidarities with people who you have nothing in common with other than the same employer happening to hire you?

I think that that sense of that intermediate is kind of creating that world of people who can bring people into a political movement. And here, Gramsci is quite clear: there is no education without educators. There’s no organization without organizers.

Daniel Denvir

How does Gramsci help us think about organizing in a more political way than the American tradition? That tradition has been so heavily influenced by the anti-political Saul Alinsky, but also shaped by a century-plus of black and labor freedom struggles.

Michael Denning

And one movement that is shaped from day one by the Alinsky model — you know, in some sense, one of the most powerful of those Alinskyite models — is the farmworkers of Cesar Chavez and the building of the boycotts of lettuce and of grapes. So that sentence was not meant as a kind of attack on the American organizing tradition, but meant rather for us, I think, in the United States, to recognize how rich the tradition that we have is. But you know, how come there’s no socialist party in American history? One could put it the other way around. Why are there so many powerful left-wing organizing traditions in American history?

On the other hand, many of us who went through those different moments probably can remember moments where larger issues of culture, of education, of what the new conception of the world that we are fighting for were bracketed, often in the interest of what has to be done tomorrow. There is a kind of way in which the pragmatic nature and results-oriented nature of US politics, the fact that indeed pragmatism is in some sense the kind of fundamental US ideology . . . You know, if one were to say, who is the American Gramsci? It’s probably John Dewey, the great pragmatist philosopher, also one of the great theorists of progressive education. Dewey’s ideas have become common sense in many ways for left-liberal teachers and political people in all sorts of ways — people who probably don’t even realize that they’re doing what Dewey had said.

And that notion — that kind of results-oriented, instrumental way of thinking about politics — has a lot of power to it, but it misses, I think, what Gramsci reminds us of: that one really has to have a different conception of the world. There’s not just a long-term changing of people’s ideas on a particular issue; to change someone’s mind about, say, their stance on abortion, is dependent on an entirely different understanding of the world and of life and of the relations between men and women and of situations of sexuality. These are not just issues in that short way. In some senses, those parts of the American left that were hegemonic in that way — if one thinks of the power of the women’s movement in “consciousness raising” of that moment — have sometimes sort of started from one’s own life.

That’s what Gramsci says: the first thing we have to do is understand the self as this contradictory place and to make an inventory of the traces of that history that are inscribed in our own selves. And in some sense, that was the powerful Gramscian moment — though they rarely cited Gramsci, and they didn’t need to — of the early women’s movement. One actually had to think about how one’s own personal life had been shaped in some ways in order to imagine a world and an emancipatory world beyond that.

The first thing we have to do is understand the self as this contradictory place and to make an inventory of the traces of that history that are inscribed in our own selves.

And so somehow to capture those two halves — not to give up the day-to-day political issue, but to realize that argument about every one of us being a legislator, meaning in a fundamental way that the personal is political, that in some ways the personal is one of those terrains where legislation is taking place — is, I think, one of the things that Gramsci powerfully reminds us of.

The other thing that I think is why I find myself going back so often to Gramsci, reading Gramsci with younger people, is Gramsci rarely has a sort of condescending “I told you so.” His opposition to economistic politics — “oh, well, it’s because it was in somebody’s self-interest, they were making money or whatever” — is not that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s a cheap way of making you feel like you know more than the other people do. And Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, particularly, are a powerful reflection on what went wrong, why they were defeated.

And he says about those three parts of the party that you just mentioned, that the responsibility may be unequal in different cases, but all of them are responsible for the defeat. And he’s saying that in the face of a fascist regime coming into power. And we have to think both as leaders of the party, as the intermediaries and as the members of what we did wrong and how to understand that. And so there’s a kind of powerful humility about Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks that is, let’s say, not there in some of the more celebrated Marxists who are writing, say, after the victory of a revolutionary regime in some kind of place — “you know, well, if you just follow the way we’ve done it, then you too, will do this drama.” Gramsci actually is more like the opposite: don’t do what we did because what we did didn’t work. But actually think seriously about what we tried.

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It’s Not Arbitrary

Daniel Denvir

Gramsci writes about a successful ideological project: “It is evident that this kind of mass creation cannot just happen arbitrarily around any ideology simply because of the formerly constructive will of a personality or group which puts it forward solely on the basis of its own fanatical, philosophical or religious convictions. Mass adhesion or non-adhesion to an ideology is the real critical test of the rationality and historicity of modes of thinking.”

This seems on some level like a really obvious insight, and yet it’s so common still today for people to believe either that good arguments can win political fights or that just sheer perseverance can win a struggle. And I would argue that this is maybe more common among people on both the Left and the center, because the Right arguably is both more adept at linking economic crises to social politics on the symbolic level, but also at attaching its ideology to mass institutions like evangelical churches. I don’t think the Left has been able to figure this out in the absence of mass union density. And obviously there’s not that much of a religious left either.

Are we on the Left stuck in this position where we have all these theories of organization but stuck bowling very alone?

Michael Denning

Gramsci doesn’t often write about left and right in that way that we think about. You know, for Gramsci, there are really the dominant classes, the ruling classes — the people who control the economic and political levers of power — and the subaltern. But if one were to translate sub and altern into English, as I sometimes like to do, it is the “under others.” And so one of the arguments he’ll say very straightforwardly is that, well, the history of the ruling classes is an easy history because it’s essentially the history of the state, because they control it. The history of the under others is very hard to figure out because it’s all over the place, just as the under others are all over the place. They’re not unified in a state. They’re not unified even in a political party very often.

And so the question is: How does a whole set of peoples in a society who were defined as under others — not just defined as under others, but who live as under others, who are those who are subordinate to other people or those who have precarious employment or are being bossed around all the time, who have to work all the time — actually imagine themselves together? Imagine themselves as having a conception of the world that is different than that that is given to them by the universities and the schools and the television studios and the networks and the Googles and the Twitters and all of that?

So for Gramsci, the subaltern is not just a cast of characters — it is a cast of mind. To be subaltern is to be deferential. It is to say, “Oh, somebody else knows better. Somebody else should lead in that kind of way. I will follow.” And for the moment to turn the subaltern, the under others, into another term that he uses — the “collective worker” — is actually in some sense the progress of hegemony. To actually have that moment of dependence and deference turned into a moment of self-assertion, self-legislation, self-constitution is that moment of hegemony. It draws on various traditions of the under others.

To actually have that moment of dependence and deference turned into a moment of self-assertion, self-legislation, self-constitution is that moment of hegemony.

So he’ll say again and again that there is a long tradition of fairy tales and utopian dreams and stories that someday it’s going to be different. There are long ways of reading religious scriptures across the way. He has a great example: the worker, the Catholic worker, who said, “Well, Jesus says the poor will always be with you. Isn’t that against your thing?” And the Catholic socialist worker says, “For that we will keep one poor worker just so that we don’t prove our savior wrong.”

And so he actually sees a variety of subaltern visions of the world and how it might change possibilities of a new conception of the world. He does think for the most part that these contradictory, sometimes incoherent, not necessarily connected views of the world need to be cohered — “conformed” is one of the words. For Gramsci conforming is actually a positive term. It means forming with other people, forming with other ideas. It’s related to reformation. Reforming, transformation, transforming, and conforming are all in a similar set of metaphors that he regularly uses in that kind of way.

Daniel Denvir

I think maybe the hanging thread there is in the disorganization of social life, with there still being powerful mass institutions on the Right, namely evangelical churches. It sometimes feels as though we are attempting to win these arguments either through rhetorical superiority or sheer perseverance, when what we need is these institutions.

Michael Denning

Right, so here’s a question about whether there’s a limit to Gramsci’s moment of history and why I said that the era of the party is over. Which is to say the same question of Gramsci’s not knowing about an entire industry of entertainment and mass culture.

One of the things that Gramsci’s generation was able to do was to imagine that a political party could be the focus of people’s daily life. And they were. Socialist and communist parties had sports clubs, hiking clubs, reading clubs. This was in places where there was no insurance for working-class people. So indeed, if you wanted to have insurance, even burial insurance or health insurance . . . the early kind of strike insurance came out of unions and parties. Newspapers and magazines were there; the Communist Party, even by the 1930s, had artist unions and John Reed Clubs for writers. Imagine that there was a whole kind of subculture, a world that one could be part of.

And one of the things about the shift from that moment of parties to our moment of parties is it is arguable that no one, including myself or whatever, actually goes to a political party for all of those daily life things that we have so many institutions in mass culture for. That’s actually affected the churches as well, just as the churches, whether evangelical or non-evangelical, had a place in people’s daily life. That has actually receded. And I think they were all aware of that.

One of the reasons churches have been able to hold on in some ways — one of the things that the Left failed to do, those left parties — was that they created powerful life transition moments around births, around death, around marriages and couplings and things like that. As a result, many people returned to their churches at those moments in the life course. And Gramsci, I think, thought that that was necessary, that a real new party would actually have to be a party that would celebrate births and mourn deaths and bring people together, because otherwise you really weren’t fully — in his way — a kind of ethical party or cultural party in that sense.

Whether any party will ever do that, or whether the ratification of political life into a very special part of the world dominated by professional politicians, professional pundits, professional money raisers, who, actually, that’s just what they do . . . The rest of us, it’s just like a spectator sport. You know that the Republicans and the Democrats are like the Yankees and the Red Sox. You’re born into rooting for one side. Sometimes your side doesn’t look as good as it does at other times. But basically, you’re not going to switch sides unless something dramatic really happens or whatever. Your engagement in it is not much. You know, I don’t know with me whether the Red Sox or the Democrats . . . actually, I’ve probably cried more over the Red Sox than the Democratic Party. I hate to say that.

Since our politics are divided, we vote where we live. We don’t vote where we work.

Those early days when unions had that position was a moment when the relation between one’s workplace and one’s neighborhood was often much closer, and when people who worked at the same factory lived in the same neighborhood and sometimes actually their landlords were the same people who owned the factory. And that’s much less the case now. And the separation has been noted by a number of political scientists. People often have a different politics at work — where they’re often quite militant because they actually want more salary, they want more benefits, they want more control over their work — than at home, where they actually end up being homeowners, worrying about the property values of their neighborhood, who comes into it, or whatever.

And since our politics are divided, we vote where we live. We don’t vote where we work. Political parties campaign around a certain kind of residential politics, a politics of “not in my backyard,” a politics of boundaries and borders, rather than a politics of what’s taking place at work. But those are the kind of really fundamental questions, I think, that Gramsci’s idea of how politics takes place raises for us.

Daniel Denvir

Gramsci writes, “If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer leading, but only dominant exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

In recent years, leftists have repeatedly returned to this passage and to the concept of interregnum to explore what it means to be living through what feels like such an interminable crisis. What does Gramsci mean by the interregnum that characterizes a long crisis? And how does it help us think through the nature and type of crisis that is underway?

Michael Denning

It’s kind of interesting because in that same passage, I believe he says what triggers that crisis: when the ruling class has failed in a major undertaking that it has actually asked for and received popular support for. For him, the big example of that is losing a war. If you have actually mobilized your population to fight in a war and you lose that war, that loses the legitimacy of that leadership and as a result gives tremendous new power for alternatives to emerge.

Daniel Denvir

Look at the Portuguese dictatorship, for example.

Michael Denning

Yeah, and one can even go back to the Soviet revolution, 1917. It comes out as the Russian tsarist empire is not winning that war. The Bolsheviks tie themselves to a call for land, bread, and peace. After World War II, the most powerful left-wing movements in Europe were in places where the leaderships — whether it was Greece, Italy, Vichy France — had actually made an alliance with fascism and the Nazis and were discredited. In Vietnam after the Japanese empire is defeated in World War II, it is at that moment that the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh are able to build a National Liberation Front.

The other side is that moments when those ruling classes have won have been very difficult for the Left to make headway, so that even though there was probably more popular socialist sentiment in the United States in the 1940s than at any other time in American history, the government won World War II. And it came out of the war with a tremendous sense not only of dominating the US, but a new kind of domination of the world, announcing straightforwardly that an American century was forthcoming. And that made it very difficult for the American left to organize against it. And in many ways, the American left did what it could only do, which was to see itself as the junior partner of Roosevelt’s New Deal, a New Deal for the whole world. And actually the Left at that point hoped that it could ride the coattails of Roosevelt and victory.

A generation later, I’ll just say for myself, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam actually was a major crisis of authority. That crisis led to, I would say, despite all the stuff about Watergate . . . the reason that Nixon was about to be impeached and had to resign was because of the failure of a major thing that had actually been demanded of the American people, which was to support the war in Vietnam, to support the United States as a policeman of the world in that kind of imperial thing. The double whammy of the loss of the war in Vietnam and the deep recession of 1973–74, marked by “the oil crisis,” was a powerful delegitimating moment of US leadership.

Has there been a similar one since then? That was one of my questions about 2008. Did that mark a similar crisis? Does COVID? That one I’ll let everyone who’s listening make their own decisions and analysis, because the politics depends on how you analyze that. What’s possible depends on how you see those forces.

Daniel Denvir

In terms of these levels of crisis conjunctural or organic, could there also then be a more profound level of crisis, something more fundamental that might not have been visible to Gramsci in the 1920s, a level at which deepening climate change means that these various crises underway for various durations add up at some point to something like a general crisis of the twenty-first century?

Michael Denning

Yeah, you know, I do think that Gramsci is probably not the best person to be thinking about the crises of nature, of the metabolic relation between humans and nature. Climate change is one part of but a whole set of environmental catastrophes and disasters in relation to animals, plants, the biosphere, the atmosphere throughout. In that sense, Gramsci, like many of his generation, is a Fordist Marxist who comes out of the tremendous utopianism of the metalworking machinists whom he organized, and out of those factory workers who thought they were rebuilding a new industrial world of plenty and post-poverty in some kind of way. And there’s lots of moments where Gramsci is that kind of a figure and maybe someone could find it, but I don’t really see much of the roots for a kind of ecological Gramsci.

And secondly, Gramsci felt that the communists of his generation were abstractly internationalist, that they had an idea that their internationalism was so powerful that they thought that indeed you could use the same strategies in every country and build a world working class, an international working class. Gramsci, seeing the limits of that, actually wanted to emphasize the national and the popular. Gramsci is one of the great theorists of the specificity of particular situations, of actually having to take into account the very particular natures of Italian history and Sardinian history and Mediterranean history.

Gramsci is one of the great theorists of the specificity of particular situations, of actually having to take into account the very particular natures of Italian history and Sardinian history and Mediterranean history.

And as a result, Gramsci I think gives short shrift to international crises. To actually read US crises outside of climate change or outside of the crises that are taking place in China and India and Indonesia, the largest countries in the world, would be really mistaken as well. And there’s some ways in which one of the difficulties of the Left’s tradition was often to take a particular name as a banner to fight under. That one was a Gramscian or a Trotskyist or even a Marxist or whatever. And the richer way to think of it is really that, you know, since the early nineteenth century, there have been movements of workers in the new kinds of workplaces that emerged out of the industrial revolution and the new factories and offices.

There are been movements of women that have essentially revolted against medieval and patriarchal forms of family. There have been movements of enslaved and colonized peoples, and those three sets of movements have in some ways shaped emancipatory politics for the last two hundred years. Those movements have had a lot of different political ideologies. In some sense, each of those movements has had some set of them who have thought of themselves as socialists or communists in one way or another. And within that world there’s been a smaller set who’ve imagined themselves as somehow linked to that tradition of thought that was marked by Marx and Engels.

But even then, I would say that one should be thinking of Marx and Engels, not as Marx and Engels as two people, but as part of that tremendous revolutionary generation of 1848. Marx, after all, is an exact contemporary of Frederick Douglass, and Frederick Douglass is writing his manifestos against slavery and about the revolutions of 1848 at the same time that the young Marx is writing the Communist Manifesto with Engels. And so in some sense, I think the Left has to imagine that we inherit a set of debates and contributions toward emancipation. A nineteenth-century word, twentieth-century word is probably liberation. I don’t know what the twenty-first century word is, but it is imagining some other world.

And in that sense, those figures are part of that tradition, whether it’s Marx and Douglass from the generation of 1848, or whether it’s Du Bois and Gramsci from the generation of 1919, or the figures of the 1960s, or the figures of 2008. And after you put in those names, we are in some ways in dialog with all of them and actually have to keep their work alive at one level, which is something that the more academic side like myself do, but that’s only because it can be made to live for people. Oftentimes in any kind of intellectual tradition the parents’ generation seems exhausted, and by returning to the grandparents’ generation, all of a sudden new kinds of things can happen.

Now, Gramsci was, oddly enough, probably about the same age as my grandparents. And I did feel for me that going back to Gramsci’s formulations often seemed to actually go back to before the common sense that came out of World War II, that came out of the Cold War that my parents’ generation dealt with. But I would never argue that Gramsci is necessarily the most important, the most vital, the best Marxist of the twentieth century or whatever, but rather has to be seen in what is a fundamentally rich, varied, diverse, emancipatory discourse that represents both sides, that has attempted to be organic legislators, organic organizers and organic intellectuals trying to both understand and change the world.

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Maneuvering and Positioning

Daniel Denvir

Gramsci makes a famous distinction between what he calls the war of maneuver versus the war of position for how to conceptualize socialist strategy. Before we get into the many implications of these concepts, explain what they mean.

Michael Denning

Let me say two things about them. One is, I personally am not the most drawn to Gramsci’s military metaphors. He wrote after World War I and draws a whole set of military metaphors, including this one. I’m not sure they are for me. The second is that the definition is difficult. There’s a very nice little book that came out recently, The Dialectic of Position and Maneuver, which really tries to track Gramsci’s usages and basically finds that Gramsci contradicts himself.

I found myself drawn recently to a passage where he says that there were three kinds of war: war of position, war of maneuver, and underground war. He gives an example: Gandhi’s nonviolent struggles in colonial India against the British. He says the boycott is a kind of war of position. Strikes are a kind of war of maneuver, and then the underground war is literally underground in that way, being a colonial situation.

He’s trying to think about different forms of strategy. He is trying to think outside of the models of either a purely workplace union model or a parliamentary struggle. He associates the workplace union model with Rosa Luxemburg, saying that her book on the mass strikes that took place across the Russian Empire in 1905 is the best book on war of maneuver from a working-class point of view, but he’s dissatisfied with that coming out of his own experience of the mass strikes and factory occupations of 1919 to 1920. But he’s also finds that the parliamentarism of the Italian Socialist Party, which he had been part of, and even of the Italian Communist Party, doesn’t exactly work.

So I think about them not as a kind of opposition. A more accurate way of thinking about it is as a dialectic moving back and forth between moments of a war of position and moments of a war of maneuver.

Gramsci means different things in different places. In other parts of the world, Gramsci is seen as the one European Marxist who actually looked at the world from the Global South. So the subaltern studies group in South Asia and India sees Gramsci as a way to think through some of the specificities of Indian history and the Indian subcontinent. In Latin America, particularly in Brazil and Argentina, some see Gramsci as speaking to their living in postcolonial nation states, where they are no longer colonized in the twentieth century but somehow seem to be dependent in a way on world capitalism in a way that was not unlike Southern Italy.

In other parts of the world, Gramsci is seen as the one European Marxist who actually looked at the world from the Global South.

In the second half of the century, Gramsci actually speaks to different constituencies in very different ways. In that sense, Gramsci seemed to suggest that the days of 1848 and 1917, the war of maneuver, the fast mobile strike against the state, the taking over the Winter Palace — all were passed and led into a new kind of moment of a war of position.

Daniel Denvir

In these passages where Gramsci is teasing this out, thinking about how conditions have changed since the storming of the Winter Palace — whether he’s arguing that it’s an end to the war of maneuver permanently, or whether he’s just talking about more subtle changes and in the conjuncture — he writes, “In the case of the most advanced states, civil society has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic incursions of the immediate economic element, crises, depressions, etc. The superstructures of civil society are like the trench systems of modern warfare.”

Then, “In Russia, the state was everything. Civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society. And when the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.”

What is this theory of civil society in advanced capitalist democracies, if not heralding the definitive end of the war of maneuver? Because as you argue, there’s actually more of a dialectic and tension or dynamic between the two. What does it then suggest about the operation of capitalist power in the nature of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class?

Michael Denning

In the financial crisis of 2008, when all of a sudden some of the largest banks in the world are melting down, very quickly, huge amounts of money were printed and put into the economy.

It’s intriguing — Gramsci is using the military metaphor even in that passage that he writes that it’s not that they’re challenged by the state; they’re challenged by an economic depression. And so the trenches take effect in some sense if there’s a kind of economic crisis. And so one could read the tremendous amount of energy to save the world capitalist system in those years after 2008 as an example, precisely, of those trenches. I think I would probably agree with that: it seems to be all of the accounts of the amount of work that was put together, then the fact that some countries were actually bailing out other countries, and the sense that somehow this system was too big to fail and that we’re even going to have to support some of the weak links in that in order to not see a kind of cascading or falling down of that order.

On the other hand, one would say, and here I’ll take Gramsci’s other side, which is Gramsci’s saying that the trouble with that kind of economism is that after the fact history always sounds like it was going to always be the case. So one could say the same thing about January 6. One could say, well, even when we’re watching it on television, it seemed a farcical attempt at a coup in whatever kinds of things — it seemed like the craziest thing. People were just wandering around. There were indeed some people who had their weapons, and no doubt they were brought by Proud Boys or whatever and wanted to get in. But there were other people who just seemed like — and having been to many demonstrations — they were there because it was the thing that was happening; they’re taking selfies and taking pictures.

Daniel Denvir

The Q Shaman was also there.

Michael Denning

It was a kind of strange combination. And one could say that indeed the trench systems of civil society prevented a right-wing coup and Trump taking over or whatever. But I think Gramsci would actually caution us, having lived with Mussolini, to say that lots of things can happen. He says it absolutely directly. The end of that day could have been quite different. That all of a sudden there could have been, you know, I won’t even try to imagine the scenarios, but there are scenarios where indeed there was not the peaceful transfer of power, transfer of power from Trump to Biden in two weeks.

And in fact, some of the people who ended up lining up with Biden and finally seeing all of this and trying to marginalize Trump . . . and then all of a sudden McCarthy goes from one thing to another. You see how volatile it was, and indeed a few things that could have gone differently and that could have turned into America’s March on Rome with Trump as the Mussolini figure.

And so there is a sense that Gramsci wants to capture both halves of that. One has to actually think about the power of the trenches of civil society, because after all, the banks other than the Federal Reserve, those giant insurance companies are private entities. Twitter and all of those things are private entities and not state entities; they nonetheless end up becoming the trenches that hold the state from falling at different points.

But Gramsci is also wanting to say, on the other hand states do fall. And we have seen moments when states have fallen. I remember a line from Perry Anderson that says, well, the parliamentary road to socialism has not been proved that effective very often. But the parliamentary road to fascism has happened several times. The sense that actually the forms of parliamentary regimes are not like, once you’re there, you’re there forever, is another of the kind of warnings that I think Gramsci’s attention to the conjuncture . . . In retrospect you have Hitler’s putsch a decade before he actually comes to power. It’s only in retrospect that one sees the first beer hall putsch as a kind of precursor of the Third Reich, rather than being a kind of weird, offhand abstract.

The parliamentary road to socialism has not been proved that effective very often. But the parliamentary road to fascism has happened several times.

And that was going back to that earlier thing about whether a movement is an abstract movement or whether it’s really an organic movement. The abstract movements are the ones that have the manifestos. They’ve got a bunch of people, but it never goes anywhere. It never wins any consent. The organic movements are the parties where, much to anyone’s expectation, all of a sudden . . . One might actually take, indeed, the black liberation movement of the ’50s and ’60s, the women’s liberation movement of the ’60s and early ’70s, as movements that were started by small numbers of people and take off amazingly.

You know, there’s some wonderful letters (or, I think they were the letters) that C. L. R. James is writing in the mid-1950s saying how shocked he is at this movement being led by this Southern preacher. Now, James had been watching everything in African-American politics for a decade or more and was involved in movements in St Louis and Detroit. He did not expect all of a sudden for this to emerge in Montgomery. And so there is that sense of the surprise of political movements and when all of a sudden they take off, and when they don’t take off. Another way to ask that question is, which are the ones that are real grassroots movements and which are . . . what’s the phrase?

Daniel Denvir

Grass tops.

Michael Denning

Astroturf or grass tops, right, are fake movements. And it’s hard to determine that at the beginning of any particular movement, whether it’s going to go one way or the other.

Daniel Denvir

You discuss that remarkable difference between how Gramsci was received on the Italian New Left and the New Left elsewhere. How was Gramsci received by the Anglophone Marxist left at the moment in the 1970s when the notebooks were first translated into English? So many things come to mind, especially a big impact on the circle around the New Left Review, including Perry Anderson’s 1976 mega-essay “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” which has since become a book. Also, the entirety of Stuart Hall’s work.

Michael Denning

There had been a few collections in the ’50s that came out, but the big collection in 1971, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, really puts Gramsci on the map. One of the differences in how his work is received is related to the degree that the communist tradition is powerful in a country. Gramsci becomes a figure for a reformation inside the Communist Party, for people trying to break with the old Stalinist party and trying to invent a new model. This is the case in Italy.

Among those figures in Britain, a number of them, particularly the great historian Eric Hobsbawm, will be among the first figures who bring Gramsci to the British. He was a figure in what was known as the Communist Party Historians Group and had tried to create a Gramscian culture around the British Communist Party. E. P. Thompson, though he will break from the Communist Party, nonetheless comes out of that same world. Even Stuart Hall, though, as far as I know, was never a member of the British Communist Party, and was very close to the journal Marxism Today, which becomes an outlet pushing for the reforming of the Communist Party in Britain.

One of the curious things about the Selections in English is that it puts the sections on intellectuals and education up front.

The US Communist Party was much less important politically on the Left and had basically been so destroyed by the Cold War. So Gramsci has little impact on that. There’s a little bit among certain Italian-American communists, particularly the historian Eugene Genovese. But actually the renovation of the US Communist Party is done by black activists who emphasize the US Communist Party’s important role in black activism — figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis, various dissident small-c black communists like Nelson Peery or Harry Haywood. So in the US case, it is the African-American reformation of American communism that is much more important than the Gramscian one. In that case, Gramsci has less importance.

But there’s another part where these selections come through: the student New Left. One of the curious things about the Selections in English is that it puts the sections on intellectuals and education up front. Those are the first parts of the book, and it’s very odd. I never teach the book that way, because you can’t start by trying to understand Gramsci on intellectuals and Gramsci on education. Not until you get four hundred pages in to figure out Gramsci’s basic arguments about thought and common sense and philosophy. Still, this spoke very powerfully to the New Left in North America and in Britain, because all of a sudden you had someone who was actually theorizing, from a Marxist position, the very specific position of the education system, of the forming of intellectuals, of the creation of organic intellectuals. That became really important.

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Eurocommunism

Daniel Denvir

What was Eurocommunism and how has Gramsci’s influence on it been viewed? It’s often been castigated for a certain kind of reformism. Is that fair? And why does Gramsci either way lend himself to those sorts of interpretations, both from admirers and detractors?

Michael Denning

Eurocommunism comes out of the moment in the ’60s and ’70s when the communist parties realize that they have to establish themselves as legitimate actors in a competitive parliamentary system if they want to remain mass parties, rather than tie themselves to the Leninist hope of overthrowing the state. They realized that they would have to be elected to state power, not overthrow the state.

As a result, there is a battle inside all of the parties about whether to stay with the old version of how to do politics or move to the new version. Gramsci will be taken as the figure for the move toward a more parliamentary road and doing battles in civil society. The Italian party is the one party that moved in that direction earlier than the French party or the other parties in Western Europe.

It’s hard not to see this in retrospect, in the tremendous victory by Francois Mitterrand in France in 1981, which bridged the divide between the French Socialists and the French Communists to put together a united front and win the election. At the time, it was conceivable that Mitterrand’s election was as much of a promise of the future as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s elections in Britain and the United States were. Now, in retrospect, we know that Reagan and Thatcher were the future. Eurocommunism fell apart very quickly.

In fact, at the time, the American socialist Michael Harrington wrote a wonderful account of the capital strike. International capital pulled its money out, disinvested from France, and basically said, you cannot create a French socialism on your own or else we will put France under. As a result, Mitterrand immediately walked his program back, in order to avoid crashing the French economy. Pretty quickly, Mitterrand ended up looking a lot like the Bill Clinton or Tony Blair type of social democrat.

You can criticize those social democrats for the failure of their imagination, but in fact, they were defeated. Mitterand’s original hope was to fulfill the hopes of 1968 in 1981, rather than being the pallbearer of the hopes of 1968.

That’s why for me, the moment of Gramsci’s greatest popularity clearly was in the ’70s and ’80s, when the idea of a reformed socialism that was to the left of social democracy and a communism that was not the old Stalinist thing could come together. In Donald Sassoon’s great thousand-page history, One Hundred Years of Socialism, he sees that moment in 1978–79 as the moment of the highest success of European socialism and communism, but also the moment when it then loses very quickly to the forces of neoliberal capital and the new kind of hegemony that Reagan and Thatcher represent in the early ’80s.

The moment of Gramsci’s greatest popularity clearly was in the ’70s and ’80s, when the idea of a reformed socialism that was to the left of social democracy and a communism that was not the old Stalinist thing could come together.

Daniel Denvir

What have theorists of left populism like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe drawn from Gramsci? And what sort of politics have they drawn from that, most notably Podemos in Spain? What sort of politics did their Gramscianism make for? And how did that compare to the Eurocommunist experience?

Michael Denning

It depends what you mean by populism. The difficulties that I have with the Laclau and Mouffe versions of taking up Gramsci is that they tied Gramsci’s thought with a postmodern attention to the politics of discourse and discourse as politics. You see this as early as Laclau’s first book, Politics and Ideology in Marx’s Theory: a sense that populism is a politics that creates an ideological alliance around the people against the power bloc.

As a result, it can go in a lot of different ways, because one can articulate the power bloc in different ways and one can articulate the people in different ways. But their argument is that in modern societies, particularly in electoral parliamentary electoral societies, you can’t win elections by being against the people. If you want to win an election, you actually have to say you’re on the side of the people. As a result, you generate a kind of discourse about “the people.” There’s a powerful argument by Adam Przeworski about labor parties. If you say your party is the party of, say, industrial workers, at a point where industrial workers are only 20 percent of the population, it’s very difficult to hold on to a labor or worker identity and win a majority of the people. You have to have a majoritarian strategy in electoral systems that require majorities.

Gramsci argues that a popular movement actually has to build a majoritarian strategy that includes all of those different sectors. In his day, this included the peasants; in our day, it is the service sector, workers in a variety of different social movements that have to be put together around a rhetoric.

This tendency of reading Gramsci falls into that ideologism that Gramsci himself criticized, and that misses the fact that these social groups are connected to economic foundations in one way or another. If populism simply means parties claiming to speak for the people, then everybody is a populist in modern politics, and populism isn’t a terribly interesting issue.

If populism simply means parties claiming to speak for the people, then everybody is a populist in modern politics, and populism isn’t a terribly interesting issue.

One might actually see that populism is the form of politics that has organized itself around what Marx called the secondary forms of exploitation. If wages were, in his sense, the primary form of exploitation, the various cuts that are taken out of your paycheck — taxes, rent, insurance, interest on loans — are the secondary forms of exploitation, and populist parties have often been parties that have organized around these other forms.

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Gramsci and Coalitional Politics

Daniel Denvir

In recent years, a number of socialist thinkers have picked up where Gramsci left off. I’m particularly thinking of Gabriel Winant’s work on emergent forms of class composition and what sort of coalitional possibilities they hold out. The old markers of mass heterogeneity — the peasantry, for instance — no longer exist in the way that they did, particularly in places like the United States. But this country now does have a massive, diverse professional-managerial class, variegated ranks of service workers, varying relationships to assets, particularly homeownership among working-class people. There are so many marks of contradictory differentiation.

What resources would Gramsci have for thinking about this motley class composition? And what sorts of working-class coalitions might his thinking help us think through developing under present conditions?

Michael Denning

I think he puts us on our own and has us do work like what Gabe has done. In the case of The Next Shift, he describes that long shift of Pittsburgh from being a steel town to being a hospital town, and at the same time, at various stages, the different conjunctural political battles that took place, and the way that is lived: not just as different kinds of occupations, but as he finds out in his various interviews, even in this shift in the same families as the next generation takes different kinds of jobs than their parents did, or people who have moved into a city that had been seen as a dying city to the present, when the city is seen as a growing city.

Gramsci’s view breaks up our own reified notions of who counts as workers. The first step, he says, in looking at any social movement is to figure out the composition of the people who make up this thing, and not to assume in advance that you know that composition. Just figuring out the composition of different social groups and social movements is a crucial one.

Gramsci’s view breaks up our own reified notions of who counts as workers.

I’m more invested in a continually renovated, left, emancipatory analysis than I am in it being called “Gramscian.” But it’s unlikely that one will find Gramscian thinking necessarily from people who define themselves as “Gramscians.” But as one is thinking through the particularities of different struggles, Gramsci says to us again and again that you can’t take the characters of the struggle for granted, that even social groups are formed in the process of political struggles.

Daniel Denvir

How should US leftists, as both internationalists and inheritors of a settler, slave society, work with Gramsci’s insistence that any potential hegemon needs to speak to the national popular patriotism? For obvious reasons, that has always been fraught for the US left.

Michael Denning

The two things that I think Gramsci is most useful for Americans is, one, to get out of America. One of the powers of Marxism for people on the US left is it is an international discourse that forces you to learn other languages, other national traditions, other political traditions, and not think that American politics is all there is to politics.

And the other thing is that Gramsci is very useful because he is writing in a country that, if it was ever a major world power, was well into antiquity. Gramsci is very useful in realizing how fragile any hegemonic alliance is, and it makes one have to rethink US history not as one long hegemonic moment.

On the other hand, to understand the peculiarities of American experience — the hemispheric American experience, the weird and tragic clash of European settlers, Native American inhabitants and peoples, and enslaved Africans transported by the millions — there is something about American exceptionalism, about the settler, enslaved, and indigenous histories of the Americas that Gramsci hardly grasped. Anyone who’s looking to Gramsci to figure that out would be mistaken there.

It’s clear that Gramsci’s great US counterpart, W. E. B. Du Bois, thought about those issues much later. Yet even Du Bois is not that concerned with the indigenous history of the Americas. I think we still have to write those histories in the United States and across US boundaries.

One of the problems with the Marxist tradition has been to actually, like liberal traditions, see the United States as kind of a European extension. And one would then read all the Europeans and see the United States as the end of that. Gramsci would let us think that maybe Brazilian Marxists could help us think about a new American Marxism.

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In 1960, Princess Samdech Preah Reach Kanitha Norodom Rasmi Sobbhana published one of the first definitive texts on her country’s cuisine. L'Art de la cuisine cambodgienne, or The Culinary Art of Cambodia, was an extensively researched, beautifully illustrated tome years in the making. It came at a pivotal moment, just seven years after Cambodia declared independence, when the nation was fighting to codify an identity beyond that of its former French-colonial rulers.

Only a few years after the princess’s death in 1971, civil war ripped Khmer society apart. The Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Prime Minister Pol Pot, purged Cambodia’s artists and intellectuals, along with records that detailed much of what came before “Year Zero” on April 17, 1975. Copies of The Culinary Art of Cambodia all but vanished.

Nearly half a century later, Rotanak Ros, better known as Chef Nak, has dedicated her career to preserving and reclaiming thousands of years of Khmer culinary history. After leaving her position at a nonprofit organization in 2017, Ros traveled throughout the Cambodian countryside documenting recipes from home cooks that culminated in her 2019 cookbook, Nhum: Recipes from a Cambodian Kitchen.

For her second work, Saoy: Royal Cambodian Home Cuisine, Ros turned her lens from home cooking to the lofty kitchens of the Khmer palace at the height of its influence. Saoy roughly translates to “dining in a royal setting” and the recipes here are the kind that might have once been served at state dinners. Princess Rasmi Sobbhana—a highly educated, fiercely independent maverick who met with President John F. Kennedy, refused to marry, and spent her life advocating for women—became something of a personal inspiration for the project. While the recipes in Ros’s work have all been thoroughly tested for a modern audience, the book is very much an homage to this powerful figure in Khmer history.

Gastro Obscura spoke with Ros about unpacking the essence of a cuisine, cooking with flowers, and the unlikely series of events that landed an original copy of the princess’s manuscript in her possession.

What drove you to shift your focus to the cookbook space?

My first cookbook came from a dream to share what I know, as well as to answer a question that I used to be asked: “What is Cambodian food?” After all these years, I still don’t have the answer, but hopefully the book helps explain some of it. It’s just so hard when you want to know about who you are in terms of what you ate if you don’t have anything to use as a reference. I thought that if I didn’t do anything about it, then the next generation of Cambodians would have nothing to show them that this is what we ate.

What inspired your second cookbook, Saoy?

A woman reached out after the first article [about my work] in The New York Times. In the email, she wrote that she used to live in Cambodia between 1970 and ’72. She was the daughter of the ambassador to Cambodia. And she remembers her mother producing a book that was written by Princess Norodom Rasmi Sobbhana. She wrote [The Culinary Art of Cambodia,] a cookbook of recipes she’d been collecting over the years from different members of the royal family. She wrote a book in Khmer and also another book in French and in English.

What do we know about the princess?

She was one of the aunties of our late king [Norodom Sihanouk]. A few things that I learned about her is that she never married. She devoted her life to lifting up women’s education, as well as to cooking and promoting [Khmer] cuisine. She really wanted to spread her cuisine to the world. She was able to do that with the support from the US Ambassador.

At that time, I thought that women in Cambodia were not taught to read or write, and I was wrong about that. But also I realized I was not the first one to start this journey to understand Cambodian cuisine. She devoted her life to this and this book is dedicated to her legacy. But it’s also a part of our culture and history.

What insights does the text offer into life in the Khmer palace?

It shows very different ways of cooking and ways of using ingredients. It also shows the influences of different cultures. So for example, in the book, Sobbhana stated very clearly that in the palace, they cooked French, Thai, Chinese, and Indian cuisines. The royal palace is a place that greets and serves people who come from other parts of the world to visit Cambodia.

Even the dancers, they danced different dances depending on where visitors came from. One of the daughters of the king, she danced more than the Khmer classical dance. She danced Mongolian, Chinese, Burmese dances depending who visited us and where she paid a visit to.

For me, I keep it the way it is, because I would like to honor the decisions of Sobbhana and also it’s part of the history. Also, I want to celebrate the differences, the varieties. No one and no culture exists in isolation. Everyone is influenced by each other.

Were there any French-colonial influences evident in Princess Sobbhana’s dishes?

A few dishes would use butter or milk to cook rice. In some recipes, instead of using cream or butter, she would use coconut cream to soak part of a baguette and then with the steamed or mashed chicken liver, then she would bake it with an egg white that had been whipped until foamy. So she would use some of the [French] ingredients and techniques, but then she would make them her own.

For example, the steamed chicken liver is very in the style of foie gras. But then she would make a sauce with fish sauce, lime juice, garlic, and a little chili. How would you imagine these two things together? But when they are with each other—foie gras is very rich and this sauce on the side is very fragrant. They balance each other out.

What was surprising to you in your research here?

For more than five years, I’ve spent most of my time, energy, and money trying to bring back the forgotten flavors of Cambodia. I’ve gone around the country talking to elderly people to try and dig out the textures and flavors that they still remember. But the process of making this book showed me that there are so many things we didn’t know about [Cambodian cuisine].

For example, I never knew that we used clove or fennel seeds or coriander in our cuisine many years ago. Initially, I thought these were international influences, but the more I learned, it’s written in very old Cambodian recipes. [Spices] had their own specific names. Like “clove” is klampu. When I first read the name in Khmer, I had no idea what klampu was. This is just one example of how what I thought I knew is small compared to what I don’t know.

In Cambodia we have a long mountain range called the Cardamom mountains, but I think at least 95 percent of Khmer don’t know what to do with cardamom. We had to journey to different parts of the country to understand Cambodian cardamom, which looks totally different from the one from India.

The other thing I learned about is that there are so many different ways of using flowers in our cuisine. So for instance, instead of using room temperature water in the cakes or desserts, Sobbhana uses rose water or jasmine water in the dough. Things could be very simple, but they make it in a way that’s on another level.

What is one recipe that stands out to you from your research?

There’s one recipe for “white pearl soup.” It tastes almost like congee, but it’s made with tapioca pearls. That soup really stands out in my mind. It’s very much comfort food. It looks simple, but there’s a lot of work behind it. The broth takes five or six hours to make.

That brings up a good point: Since these recipes were written for royalty, just how complicated are they?

Some soups can look very simple, but just the process of making the paste can take four people three hours to make. The paste contains 15 different ingredients that have to go through being thinly sliced, then sun-dried, then pounded, then sautéed again.

Of course, in the palace, they had people there to prep for the cooking. And I think that’s what makes it different from our day-to-day cooking. According to Ambassador Julio [ A. Jeldres], who was very close to our late king, who wrote one of the forewords in the books, everything needed to be prepared properly and took a lot of time.

Why does it feel so important to you to correct the narrative of what Cambodian food is? Why do you want the world to know about some of these recipes?

We as a people are struggling to really accept who we are. To know that these kinds of ingredients are being used here and there—we used to think we were copying this or that other country, but we had that knowledge a long time ago. It’s a fight that I have to fight. But it’s also a fight that is worth it to reintroduce these ideas and ingredients back.

The far right’s victory in elections for the Constitutional Council may be the death knell for a progressive constitution in Chile. It’s also a needed wake-up call for the Chilean left.

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The Chilean far right scored a major victory in Sunday’s elections for the newly reconstituted constitutional assembly, all but extinguishing any remaining hope of a new, progressive constitution in Chile.

The results of the election for the rebranded “Constitutional Council” would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Now in their second attempt to create a constitution, the drafting body still has a popular mandate to replace the Magna Carta imposed by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1980. However, the markedly right-wing council reflects a massive sea change in Chilean politics compared to October 2019, when the country erupted in protests against the neoliberal government of Sebastián Piñera.

The newly formed council will have fifty-one elected seats, of which twenty-three will be occupied by representatives of the far-right Republican Party, eleven from the traditional right, and only sixteen from the Left (plus one representative of indigenous peoples). In short, Sunday’s results were an electoral disaster of historic proportions for the Chilean left — the only comparable precedent being the rejection of the proposed constitution in a 2022 national plebiscite.

The victory of the far right is even more paradoxical considering their historical loyalty to the dictatorship and its “legacies.” Indeed, the Republican Party, associated with recent presidential hopeful José Antonio Kast, has always vocally opposed any changes to the existing constitution.

That being the case, the far right is now holding all the cards, and the approval of the constitution depends on their support. Even more deflating, the constitutional project is now being drafted by a technocratic “Committee of Experts,” itself appointed by a right-led National Congress.

How did Chile come to this?

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Fail Worse

Unfortunately, defeat has become a running trend for the Chilean left. The failed first attempt to draft a new constitution, led by a left-dominated Constitutional Convention, was the first dose of reality. The constitutional plebiscite of September 4, 2022, will live in memory as one of the harshest electoral defeats the Chilean left has ever been dealt. On that day, amid historic turnout rates thanks to a new compulsory voting rule, a crushing majority of Chileans (61.82 percent) rejected the proposal for a progressive constitution that the convention had been preparing since July 2021.

Among advocates of the “apruebo” (approval) vote, the initial reaction was one of shock and confusion. To date, there is still no compelling explanation for an electoral disaster of such magnitude, with the proposed constitution winning a meager 38.15 percent. That number, combined with the sudden electoral growth of the far right in the recent Council election, should be setting off alarm bells.

Apart from some self-criticism of convention procedures, the Chilean left has yet to carry out a politically productive self-analysis of their defeat.

For many leaders and intellectuals of the progressive camp, the reason for the 2022 defeat lay with a right-wing communications campaign. In that account, citizens were deceived by a “terror campaign” and “fake news” propagated in the mainstream media and social networks. The constitutional project was, they argue, derailed by the failure of the Chilean citizenry to grasp what would have been a great feminist, environmentalist, and indigenous constitution — the kind needed to remedy the evils of a constitution designed during the military dictatorship of Pinochet (1973–1990) and essentially in effect from 1990 onward. Left-wing leaders in the weeks to come may repeat the same lines, but that would be a grave mistake.

Apart from some self-criticism of convention procedures, the Chilean left has yet to carry out a politically productive self-analysis of their defeat. Now, with the far right’s surprise victory in the new council, it is more urgent than ever to reach some clarity about where things went wrong.

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The Uprising

One of the hardest things to digest about the September 2022 and May 2023 defeats is that the current political phase, opened with the uprising of October 2019, should have been enormously favorable for an anti-neoliberal agenda. That month in 2019 saw massive, spontaneous social protests — the largest since the 1980s. Millions of citizens took to the streets, determined to reject the collective humiliation to which they were subjected by the conservative government of billionaire Piñera.

The spark may have been the government’s decision to increase the subway fare in the capital of Santiago, but within days of the protests, it became clear that the grievances — many and diverse though they were — were all based on the structural inequalities born of thirty years of neoliberalism.

In that sense, the “social uprising” of 2019 was the culmination of a growing wave of mobilizations that began at least as far back as the student demonstrations of 2011, joined in the following years by different social movements: against Chile’s privatized social security system; the excessive administrative centralization in the nation’s capital; the environmental depredation of transnational (and national) companies; the shortcomings of the country’s public health system; and pervasive gender inequalities combatted by feminist and youth movements, among others.

It is no coincidence that all these grievances were channeled into the demand for a new constitution. Amid protests, a conservative congress and government were ultimately forced to accept the bankruptcy of their political and economic model and initiate an unprecedented process of constitutional change, which not even the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 could stop.

For some time, the situation still seemed favorable for the Left. In October 2020, the plebiscite to ratify the beginning of the constitutional process was decided by an approval vote of 78.28 percent. Furthermore, the May 2021 vote for the Constitutional Convention elected a heterogeneous majority of independent assembly members: indigenous, feminists, and environmentalist activists, as well as intellectuals and militants of left and center-left parties. The political right, on the other hand, failed to elect a third of Convention members — the threshold that would have allowed it to exercise veto power.

Moreover, as the convention was deliberating in November and December 2021, the leftist and former student leader Gabriel Boric clinched the presidential election. That sequence seemed to imply the end of the political hegemony of the two large center-left and right-wing blocs that had dominated during the three decades of post-dictatorial government.

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Chile’s Thermidor

Why, then, did the “rejection” vote triumph in September 2022? And how did the far right suddenly become the driving force in Chilean politics?

First, the COVID pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis radically altered the political landscape, modifying the priorities of large parts of the Chilean population — including part of the most mobilized participants of October 2019. The spirit of the “social uprising” was deeply connected with a strong antiestablishment sentiment, a fact reflected in the initial plebiscite of 2020 and the election of independents during the Constitutional Convention of 2021.

The 2022 presidential election was an early warning of a major shift in popular sentiment, especially since the far-right candidate Kast won first place in the first round (albeit in a context of high electoral fragmentation). Parliamentary elections did not augur well for the Left, either: not only did Kast’s ultraright and the traditional right come out stronger, so did the People’s Party (PDG), a populist, demagogic, and opportunistic group, which, despite its strong antiestablishment discourse, in practice was on the right of the political spectrum.

The COVID pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of Chilean neoliberalism: few state-guaranteed health measures, low wages and high indebtedness, and regulations favoring capital over labor. All this resulted in high unemployment mixed with something Chileans had not experienced for decades: inflation.

Security, migration, and cost of living have now become priority issues for most Chilean citizens. The right-wing political opposition and media have seized on this situation to attack the government.

At the same time, the number of undocumented Venezuelan immigrants increased rapidly, largely in response to public invitations made by the government of Piñera. The lack of state infrastructure to receive migrants and the harsh conditions of social marginalization and overcrowding — coupled with the extreme economic hardship of many Chileans — caused crime and violence to rise to levels unfamiliar by local standards.

Security, migration, and cost of living have now become priority issues for most Chilean citizens. The right-wing political opposition and media have seized on this situation to attack the government and, above all, to re-signify the memory of the “social uprising:” no longer seen as a legitimate and genuine expression of citizen unrest but as a criminal outburst.

Still dealing with problems internal to his cabinet, Boric’s government has struggled to adapt to these new circumstances. Boric supported laws that invest the police with new powers, despite the fact that the mood on the Left — especially after the police brutality during the 2019 protests — was calling out for a deep reform of the “Carabineros,” the main Chilean police institution. It remains to be seen how effective Boric’s attempt at political adaption will be, and at what cost to the loyalty of his own political base.

Worse still, none of Boric’s policies have paid dividends with the broader Chilean electorate: the far right is still profiting politically from the hardships of Chilean citizens. In fact, Kast and his Republicanos have succeeded in converting social deterioration into millions of votes, with generous funding from the most reactionary fractions of Chilean capital.

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Conventional Quagmire

The constitutional project ran aground for reasons that go beyond economic and social circumstances. To date, the Chilean left has said very little about a separate issue: the ideological problems that dogged the convention’s proposals. At the center of those proposals was the idea of a “social state” and “social rights,” which included provisions to ensure gender equality, the right to a pollution-free environment, and measures for the recognition, reparation, and autonomy of indigenous peoples.

All of these are legitimate banners for the Chilean left. To dismiss them as the caprices of “identity politics” is to be out of step with the changes the Chilean left has undergone in recent decades. However, many debates at the convention revolved around simplistic understandings of Chilean history that did little to endear them to the general populace: the state and the republic, some claimed, are oppressive structures created by the ruling classes and have straitjacketed indigenous ancestral identities (now apparently free to emerge in all their purity). The nation, they continued, should be “pluralized” into a series of communities (or “peoples”) rooted in “territories,” thus questioning the constitutive unity of the country itself.

This pluralized notion of the state and the nation gave rise to a set of proposals that left a bad taste in people’s mouths: the call for separate local justice systems for indigenous peoples or the replacement of the Senate (one of the oldest in the modern world) by a chamber of regional representation.

The media cast a spotlight on these controversial aspects and amplified a number of scandals surrounding the convention with the clear objective of discrediting it and inflating the “rejection” vote in the exit plebiscite. But the full magnitude of the defeat lies elsewhere.

Many members of the convention continued to act as if the country were living in a constant state of social upheaval. Indeed, the resounding number of votes obtained in the 2020 plebiscite had convinced many that approval was all but guaranteed and that the actual contents of the constitution were almost secondary. And it was that optimism that discouraged a more comprehensive discussion about how a constitution could advance a new Chilean state and society in line with popular, working-class aspirations.

The state, the republic, the nation, and democracy are all familiar enough sites of struggle for the Chilean left. After all, Salvador Allende’s “Chilean road to socialism” was built on the idea that democracy was a conquest of the workers, the nation a community among equals, and the state an institutional apparatus that could be conquered, its class biases altered in the pursuit of socialism. The old left was first and foremost concerned with the material conditions of existence and the structural inequalities of dependent capitalism.

It is not that these concerns went missing in constitutional debates. But the simplistic and sometimes unfounded criticisms of republican egalitarianism, dear to so many social movements, had an outsized role in discussions of the state. Without the need to renounce feminist, indigenous, or environmental struggles, the Chilean left must rethink these causes as part of a comprehensive project of social change that aspires to take power and build connections with popular and working sectors.

The simplistic and sometimes unfounded criticisms of republican egalitarianism, dear to so many social movements, had an outsized role in discussions of the state.

The usual explanations offered by progressive sectors for their defeat (the role of the media, the lack of understanding of the people) betrays a worrying middle-class paternalism toward the Chilean people who, in their account, would not be virtuous enough to understand what is in their own interest. Moreover, that thinking prevents the much-needed political reflection and criticism to get out of the current political quagmire.

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Fifty Years Later

The constitutional process will lumber into 2023 as the product of left defeat and a sharp conservative turn in Chilean politics and public opinion. It is a process of limited scope carefully controlled by establishment parties. Still waiting for the far right–dominated Constitutional Council to take the reins, a “Commission of Experts” appointed by Congress is formulating the contents of the constitution at a safe distance from the popular will.

For now, the Left must act as a force of real resistance to the conservative onslaught and prevent any radicalization of Chile’s thirty-year-old neoliberal state. Strange as it may sound, this could even mean organizing a rejection campaign to stop the passage of a right-backed constitution. More importantly, in order to recover from these harsh electoral blows, the Left must begin a process of introspection about its ideological deficiencies, taking inspiration in its own rich history.

In 2023, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état that violently ended the democratic-socialist government of Allende and the Popular Unity, the Left would do well to remember several things: the patience and long-term vision shown by that political and social formation, built amid advances and setbacks taking place over several decades. Egalitarian structural change will not be achieved by a stroke of good fortune or by an enlightened vanguard of legislators. It will be the product of the slow accumulation of forces and the construction of a lasting hegemony rooted in the aspirations, expectations, and interests of the working majorities of Chile.

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From the road, the Museo de Historia Natural Río Seco looks like an unmarked, abandoned roadside fish-processing warehouse. Inside, it’s an eye-opening collaboration between biologists and artists that displays the skeletons and other remnants of local whales, birds, reptiles and mammals in lifelike poses. Yes, it sounds macabre, but it's enough to fascinate even a squeamish traveler.

The museum was founded in 2013 by brothers Benjamín Cáceres, a marine biologist, and Miguel Cáceres, a visual artist, and is housed in industrial buildings of the seaweed firm Algina.

Let your favorite mapping app lead you to the unmarked driveway, pull up the hill and park. No, you're not lost in the wreckage of an abandoned industrial complex. Follow other patrons to the main building, where young, passionate, informed, and eloquent docents lead tours of the rooms every 15 minutes or so. Or, once you're comfortable, wander the exhibits yourself.

Skeletonized birds spread their wings overhead or peek at you from alcoves, while cetacean skeletons are posed seeming to swim through the room.  Notable exhibits include the suspended skeleton of a sei whale that washed up, and the skulls of over a dozen "false killer whales" that perished in a mass stranding.

THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE APRIL 1, 2023, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE.

When I was in Guatemala, my friends took me to try what they called “Thai empanadas.” I saw a group of people tending to a griddle while speaking Mandarin, and immediately realized that these cooks were Taiwanese, not Thai. I ordered five-spice empanadas in Mandarin—a welcome relief from my poor Spanish—and immediately felt a little more at home.

As a Chinese-American, I’m always on the lookout for new versions of Chinese food. I’ve encountered Portuguese-Chinese food prepared in a clandestine third floor apartment-restaurant in Lisbon, chūka ryōri (Japanese-style Chinese food) in bustling Tokyo streets, and Chinese takeout in the mall of a South African resort town.

I’m not the only Chinese person who travels this way. Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Cheuk Kwan spent four years filming Chinese Restaurants, a 2006 documentary series spanning six continents and 14 countries. During the pandemic, he chronicled these experiences in a book, Have You Eaten Yet? Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World, named for a common greeting in the Chinese-speaking world.

Kwan, who now lives in Toronto, grew up between Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan and speaks five languages. Everywhere he goes, he finds a taste of home in Chinese restaurants, peeking into the kitchen to connect with cooks and owners.

“Running a Chinese restaurant is the easiest path for new Chinese immigrants to integrate into a host society,” Kwan writes in Have You Eaten Yet?. “It’s a unique trade where no other nationalities can compete, and it provides work for new arrivals, whether legal or illegal, helping them get on their feet.”

Kwan’s project was inspired by a restaurant in Istanbul whose Muslim Chinese founder, a political leader in the Nationalist Party, fled China on foot over the Himalayas after the Communist Revolution. At a meal with the restaurant’s owners, Kwan was treated to halal Chinese dishes such as braised mutton and pan-fried dumplings with beef swapped in for pork.

In 2000, Kwan interviewed Noisy Jim who immigrated to Canada in 1937 during the Chinese Exclusion Act. In the 1950s, Jim opened the beloved New Outlook Cafe in the prairie town of Outlook in Saskatchewan, Canada. He built such close relationships with his loyal customers, who would come to chat and eat hearty Canadian and Westernized Chinese food, that he would lend them keys to the place so they could cook outside of business hours.

Restaurateur and minister Kien Wong was drawn to Haifa, Israel by faith. A member of Vietnam’s large Chinese population, Wong fled his home country by boat in 1978 and volunteered to be interviewed for refuge by an Israeli official so he could “spread the gospel in the Holy Land,” as Kwan writes in his book. He opened a restaurant and became a chef-preacher, proselytizing to Chinese immigrants and cooking them dishes like Cantonese-style St. Peter’s fish, caught fresh from the Galilee.

In the multi-ethnic island nation of Mauritius, Kwan interviewed Collette Li Piang Nam, a Hakka Mauritian woman who devised a fusion menu for her restaurant nestled in a sugarcane field. Since the 1800s, the Hakka Chinese minority has deeply integrated into the island’s Creole culture. Nam makes Kwan her house special: wok-fried fish in tomato sauce.

I spoke with Kwan about Malagasy wonton soup, the challenges faced by immigrant cooks, the global appeal of Chinese cuisine, and what he wishes more people knew about Chinese restaurants. Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Q & A with Cheuk Kwan

What would you say is the Chinese food culture overseas that surprised you the most?

Nothing surprised me as much as what I saw in Madagascar.

They were serving wonton soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Any Malagasy restaurant will serve it. Malagasies who run the restaurants call it soupe chinoise. It's a “you-don't-have-to-be-a-German-to-serve-a-hamburger" kind of thing. Authentic Chinese food is actually served as a national dish.

Were there any dishes that you tried in Chinese restaurants that seemed completely new to you?

No, not really. Because of my background, I'm very used to having all kinds of Chinese food. [But] there are cases like this: where I had ostrich meat, stir-fried in black bean sauce in South Africa. But that's still identifiably Chinese, even though the ingredient is totally off the books for me.

Do you crave Chinese food when you travel?

Yes, that's how I got into Chinese Restaurants. I always want to have some white rice and green veggies. After a while, all this pizza and pita bread gets to you. It’s just that Chinese stomach in me [laughs].

What’s the most memorable meal that you had?

[A] meal that I really enjoyed was in Argentina. It was parrilla [barbecue], and it was in the cottage of this guy we met. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon and we were all eating and drinking in the garden and on the patio. I was meeting with my Chinese restaurant owner and his friends. They're all kind of an older generation. They came from China, and here they are so far away from home. To me, that's very poignant, in terms of meeting as friends and partaking in a meal that happens to be not Chinese, but also very local.

Why do you think Chinese restaurants have had such a big impact on the world?

First of all, [Chinese food] is [often] distinctive enough from the native culture for people to really enjoy it and share it. But also, it's appetizing enough for people to say, “I can have it every day.” You can do very elaborate Chinese food, but you can always do simple Chinese food as long as you have a wok.

A lot of it is the food, but also a lot of it is the people behind it. And that's the crux of my storytelling: Who are these people who are behind this kitchen, behind the woks, and making up this fresh food that is adaptable to local tastes?

It's that entrepreneurial spirit that you can even taste in your food.

Do you think that the people cooking Chinese food all around the world see themselves as trailblazers and entrepreneurs?

I don’t think so. I think the whole global phenomenon is a byproduct of just individual hard work, of people trying to survive. I think, if you look behind most Chinese restaurants—not the commercial ones, but the Mom-and-Pop family restaurants—it's basically a story about immigration, diaspora, survival, and probably hardship and discrimination.

Is there a specific story of discrimination that's coming to mind for you?

In Peru, Chinese people were really blatantly discriminated against and [were] indentured laborers. So you congregate in Chinatown and try to protect yourself in the enclave. They had to do a lot of incorporation of Peruvian food into Chinese food to survive, but then it took off, and people really liked it. So chifa [Chinese-Peruvian cuisine] then became the national cuisine of Peru.

Is there anything that you wish more people understood about Chinese restaurants?

A Chinese restaurant has that image of being a cheap eating place. People in Chinatown are saying, “Why can't we be treated more like French food? You value that kind of thing, right?” Don't treat Chinese restaurants like a cheap joint that you can go to for convenience.

In your book, you talked about the diversity of the Chinese diaspora itself. Why was that important to you?

I wanted to make my films for Chinese people and say, “You are not as pure as you think.”

All those maritime voyages and the Silk Road all brought cultures and people from everywhere, and they got mixed into the population. And of course, food-wise, too, Chinese food is not as pure as you think either. A lot of influences from other places.

That's my message. When it comes down to it, we're all one world.

Following an alleged illegal mass conversion 30 years ago, 137 Orang Asli from the Bateq Mayah ethnic group petitioned the civil court to have their Islamic status annulled.

On Sep. 28, last year, the 137 plaintiffs filed a writ of summons at the Kuala Lumpur High Court through the law firm Fahri Azzat & Co.

The Orang Asli Development Department (Jakoa), its director and officer, the Pahang Islamic Religious and Malay Customs Council (Muip), the state government, and the federal government were named as defendants in the civil action.

According to the statement of claim sighted by Malaysiakini, they alleged that the wrongful and illegal conversion was carried out at their home at Kampung Benchah Kelubi, Merapoh, Kuala Lipis, Pahang, in April 1993.

The plaintiffs claimed that in early 1993, a Jakoa representative asked two village leaders to not only convert to Islam but also persuade the other villagers to do the same.

They claimed that when the villagers refused, a department officer went to the village and threatened them repeatedly until they converted.

Some of these threats include forbidding the villagers from remaining in the village, destroying their homes and crops, and pursuing and torturing them if they fled to the mountains.

The plaintiffs argued that the villagers were not made aware of the legal repercussions of converting to Islam, including the fact that they would be subject to Pahang’s Islamic legal system and that any children they had would be Muslims by default.

They claimed that a few days later, the same Jakoa officer returned to the village along with a few Muip officers, and that when they did, they gathered the villagers in a public space and instructed them to recite the kalimah syahadah.

The plaintiffs alleged that the villagers tried to mimic the Jakoa officer’s Islamic recitation but failed to do so. They also claimed that the villagers were unable to comprehend the meaning of kalimah syahadah or how their lives would change as a result of converting to Islam.

[The kalimah syahadah – one of the Five Pillars of Islam – is an Islamic oath that reads “I bear witness that there is no deity but God (Allah), and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”]

They claimed that the officers took down all of the villagers’ names and then left.

However, the plaintiffs claimed that they profess or practise Islam following the alleged mass conversion and continued to profess and practise the cultural and religious beliefs of the Bateq Mayah.

They claimed that after 2000, when more villagers learned basic Bahasa Malaysia, they discovered that the word “Islam” was printed on their identity cards.

Practice animism

According to the Aboriginal Peoples Act of 1954, the plaintiffs contended that the Bateq Mayah, who practise animism, are a vulnerable group who rely on the defendants to protect their way of life from modernisation and exploitation.

“In 1993, the defendants wrongfully exploited their influence over the aboriginal peoples in the village and, in breach of their duties to them, wrongfully, illegally and used duress to convert them to Islam.

“In doing so, they breached their duty to protect and preserve the cultural and religious beliefs of those peoples,” the plaintiffs contended.

They asserted that they sought assistance from the Malaysian Human Rights Commission (Suhakam) in around 2004, and that the organisation later produced a 2013 report titled “Report of the National Inquiry into the Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

The plaintiffs argued that the mass conversion was unlawful and in violation of Section 101 of the Administration of Islamic Law Enactment (Pahang) 1991 because the villagers failed to recite the kalimah syahadah in a language that was reasonably understandable to them, were illiterate enough to not be aware of its meaning, and did not do so of their own free will.

They are asking the court to declare a number of things, including that the plaintiffs do not practise Islam, that any children born to them after the filing of this lawsuit do not practise Islam, and that the plaintiffs have the freedom to practise and profess their own spiritual and cultural beliefs without interference from the defendants.

Additionally, they ask for general damages to be determined by the court, exemplary and/or aggravating damages, costs, 5% interest on the awarded judgement amount, and any other relief the court deems appropriate.

Five of the defendants have since filed applications to strike out the lawsuit over several grounds, among them that the civil action was filed 29 years after the alleged mass conversion, and thus filed out of time per Section 2 of the Public Authorities Protection Act 1948 and Section 6 of the Limitations Act 1953.

The other defendant Muip has filed an application to dispute the jurisdiction of the civil court to hear the case because the issues raised in the civil action comes under the jurisdiction of the Pahang Syariah Court.

The High Court in Kuala Lumpur has set April 17 for case management of the plaintiffs’ bid to transfer the civil action to the High Court in Kuantan.

The Attorney-General’s Chambers is acting for the federal government as well as Jakoa and its director and officer. Pahang’s legal adviser is representing the state government.

Law firm Syahidah Sharul & Marsyara is Muip’s legal representative.

Uno de los factores que más influyeron en la percepción negativa de la Convención Constitucional –mucha gente basó su voto en eso, sin conocer el texto– fue el comportamiento de algunos de sus integrantes. Personas vestidas de personajes infantiles o que votaban desde la ducha y, por supuesto, los que habían engañado a los electores, como Rojas Vade.

Sin embargo, el comportamiento de algunos políticos, en la actualidad, está superando con holgura a la tía Pikachu. Episodios en que han estado involucrados la Dra. Cordero, Kaiser, De la Carrera, Rivas, Jiles, Chahuán y Orsini, entre otros, dan cuenta de ello.

Hace unos días, Chilevisión presentó un reportaje acerca de los atrasos y engaños en que incurren algunos diputados. ¿Qué pensaran los ciudadanos cuando ven que parlamentarios llegan una hora tarde a su trabajo todos los días o marcan “tarjeta” –en la pantalla del PC– para aparecer presentes en Sala, pero abandonan su puesto 25 segundos después, como el caso de los diputados Lavín y Undurraga? ¿Cómo percibirán las personas la explicación dada por el diputado Gaspar Rivas, el que justificó sus permanentes atrasos debido a su TOC? “Me demoro en llegar porque limpio mi teléfono, el cable, la pantalla…”. Una vergüenza considerando que el resto de los chilenos y chilenas no pueden darse el lujo de abandonar sus trabajos o llegar tarde sin recibir sanciones o descuentos en su salario.

Claro que Gaspar Rivas nos tiene acostumbrados a sus numeritos en el Congreso. Se ha disfrazado de sheriff, ha llorado en sus redes sociales, además de pelearse a empujones con miembros de su mismo partido, del cual después fue expulsado.

También en el último tiempo, hemos visto en la Cámara de Diputadas y Diputados a parlamentarios vestidos de cocineros –para ironizar sobre los acuerdos políticos–, al senador Chahuán llegando con una guitarra a La Moneda –para burlarse del Presidente–, a Gonzalo de la Carrera amenazando e insultando a sus colegas –incluidos sus pares de derecha, como Diego Schalper–, dando combos en la testera y grabando a sus colegas de manera agresiva. Aunque algo más medido –al menos no ha cuestionado el derecho a voto de las mujeres, como lo hizo en 2020–, Johannes Kaiser sigue horrorizándonos con sus frases xenófobas y sus opiniones sin empatía, como cuando hace unas semanas, y en el contexto de la discusión del proyecto de ley que busca crear una pensión para los hijos de víctimas de femicidio, manifestó que se oponía porque pasarían a constituirse en un grupo “privilegiado”.

Y no olvidar el telefonazo de Maite Orsini a una general de Carabineros, y a Pamela Jiles «volando» por el hemiciclo de la Cámara y ahora presentando nuevamente la idea de un retiro de fondos previsionales –con una franja presidencial de disfraz–, pese a que las personas que más necesitan apoyo son aquellas a las que no les queda un peso en su cuenta de ahorro. No se le conocen otras iniciativas a esta diputada; claro, la creatividad no es un requisito para salir electo en este país.

Por otra parte, tenemos al alcalde Carter que, a lo Bukele, y aprovechando la sensibilidad por el tema de seguridad, monta un verdadero show mediático, en horario prime de los matinales, con cientos de policías y cámaras derribando “narco-casas” en sectores populares, sin importarle si estigmatiza a las personas de esos barrios y sin certeza de que correspondan verdaderamente a narcotraficantes o a parientes de esos delincuentes. Total, lo que prima es el rating, y el sacarles ventajas a sus rivales en la derecha. De paso, tratando de manera muy poco cortés al Presidente Boric, como si el problema de la delincuencia hubiera comenzado hace un año en Chile. Yo, en particular, encuentro que todas las medidas que ayuden a combatir este flagelo de la delincuencia y narcotráfico son bienvenidas, pero algo distinto es el espectáculo, con evidentes fines electorales.

Para el final hemos dejado el caso de María Luisa Cordero, una médico-psiquiatra que actúa sin respetar la ética médica, dando «diagnósticos» –según ella– en espacios televisivos y radiales durante años, para pasar después a la Cámara, pese a que se le ve más tejiendo que ejerciendo el cargo. Esta diputada –ese es su cargo actual, no está ahí como médica– de pensamiento hablado, suele descalificar a quien se le cruce por delante. La profesional ha tratado de indios y feos a Alexis y a Vidal, y señalado que su voto “vale 10 veces más” que el de una asesora del hogar, entre otras barbaridades. Hace solo una semana, dio a conocer –según ella– un diagnóstico del Presidente Boric, basado en una ficha médica a la que, supuestamente, habría tenido acceso. Lo trató de “enfermo mental” –una falta de respeto tremenda para una persona que forma parte de un poder del Estado–, dando a conocer aspectos que un médico tiene prohibido filtrar y que luego fueron duramente desmentidos por el profesional que ella indicó. Recordemos que, en tiempos de la dictadura, hubo profesionales que dieron su vida por proteger las fichas médicas e intimidad de sus pacientes. Bueno, por algo esta señora fue expulsada del Colegio Médico.

Pero el episodio en que se burló de manera brutal de Fabiola Campillai, sobrepasó todo límite. Sin mediar provocación, disparó de manera cruel, ironizando con la ceguera de la senadora. Además, luego señaló que no estaba dispuesta a ofrecerle disculpas, ya que era “su forma de ser” y lo que ella había hecho era un diagnóstico como médica. O sea, no solo mostrando cero empatía e incapacidad de decir “lo siento” o “me equivoqué”, sino que agravando la falta. Argumentó que lo había hecho para darle esperanza –realmente una burla– y que un médico no pide disculpas por un diagnóstico –¿es eso cierto?–. Dos alcances, además del hecho de que Cordero está ahí como parlamentaria y no como psiquiatra, no le ha tocado diagnosticar a la senadora, y tampoco es oftalmóloga.

La política-espectáculo se ha tomado la política chilena nuevamente, como antes de la crisis de los partidos y de las instituciones, que derivó en el estallido social de 2019. Por supuesto que aquí hay cuatro componentes que se mezclan en este tiempo y que, de seguro, generan dudas en un sector de la ciudadanía. Primero, quienes creen que por ser parlamentarios gozan de privilegios que los chilenos no tienen, como el no cumplir con sus obligaciones laborales, más aún siendo empleados del Estado, pagados por todos nosotros. Segundo, los que usan el populismo como una forma de lograr votos fáciles, pero que lamentablemente juegan con la fragilidad de las personas –como el sexto retiro o pensar que el narcotráfico parará derribando la casa de los más débiles de esa cadena delictual–. Tercero, los que no tienen nada que envidiar a los mismos que criticaron de la Convención y que hoy se disfrazan de sheriffs o cocineros. Y cuarto, aquellos que se sienten con la libertad de insultar, agredir y burlarse de los otros, aprovechando su tribuna pública. Estos últimos, como lo demostró el episodio de la diputada Cordero, en que la senadora recibió el apoyo unánime de todos(as) los(as) senadores(as) –una señal muy positiva y potente del Senado–, no deberían nunca más tener cabida en la política chilena.

No fue fácil llegar a conversar con los patriarcas de la élite empresarial del país. Lo logró desde un puente que no falla: el espiritual. Fue un sacerdote jesuita el que le abrió las puertas de las casas y oficinas de los guardianes del modelo neoliberal chileno. Así lo relata Alejandro Pelfini, doctor en Sociología de la Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg de Alemania, argentino y académico de la Universidad del Salvador y de Flacso-Argentina, que presentó su libro ¿Son o se hacen?: Las élites empresariales chilenas ante el cuestionamiento ciudadano, de Ediciones UAH.

Este trabajo –que hizo junto a su colega Omar Aguilar, doctor en Sociología de la UAH, producto del Fondecyt regular 1141001, La transformación de las élites empresariales en una sociedad emergente. Distinción, tolerancia y transnacionalización de las élites empresariales chilenas, y realizado entre 2014 y 2017– cubre un período histórico marcado por los escándalos de corrupción, colusión, financiamiento ilegal de la política, estallido social y proceso constituyente. “Fue un momento que puso en tela de juicio la supuesta superioridad y capacidad de liderazgo de los ‘guardianes del modelo’, porque la ciudadanía los apuntó como abusadores”, dice Pelfini. 

Quisieron indagar en la definición de este grupo y cómo respondieron al cuestionamiento por su riqueza y probidad moral, no solamente en Santiago sino también en regiones. Para lograr un análisis robusto hicieron treinta entrevistas a sus representantes, a las que agregaron otras más recientes sobre las actitudes predominantes del empresariado respecto de la nueva Constitución. Fue un trabajo largo, de años, y que finalizó con el prólogo encargado al destacado periodista Daniel Matamala, quien utilizó la metáfora del espejo de la bruja de Blancanieves para retratar a una élite con exceso de vanidad e incapacidad de aceptar la realidad y la verdad de las cosas.

Matamala se pregunta: «¿Qué respuesta ha recibido históricamente la élite empresarial chilena cuando pregunta a su espejo? ¿Cómo ha cambiado esa respuesta en los últimos años? ¿Cuál ha sido la reacción ante los cambios de la realidad económica, política y social del país? La investigación responde a todas estas interrogantes y también a la del título ‘¿Son o se hacen?’”.

Para Pelfini, la élite nacional heredó una serie de capitales y un habitus que le permite concebirse, ejercer y ser percibida como grupo privilegiado. La pregunta “son o se hacen” tiene que ver con sus orígenes, su continuidad en el tiempo, la relación con la clase alta, su capacidad de renovación y de vincularse al Estado y a la clase política. Esto último, en nuestro país, lo lograron a partir de la segunda fase de la dictadura. “Lo primero que quisimos hacer fue definirlos, porque es difícil y polémico”, señala.

–¿Por qué es tan complejo?
–Porque en Chile, cuando se habla de élite, se dicen cosas como viven en el barrio alto, pero esa categoría no significa nada; otros la definen como el 1% más rico, pero eso habla muy poco de su capacidad de organización; otros dicen que son los dueños de las empresas más grandes de Chile o quienes encabezan los rankings internacionales como Forbes. A mí me parece que esos criterios no son satisfactorios; no muestran la capacidad organizativa y de agencia que sí tienen los grandes empresarios que actúan políticamente. Una cosa son los empresarios, otra el empresariado, y otras sus vanguardias y sus personajes clave.

 –¿Cómo pudo acceder a ellos?
–Le tengo que agradecer mucho a la Universidad Alberto Hurtado, porque nosotros empezamos con los contactos clave que nos llevaron a las fuentes más cercanas, pero en un momento nos dimos cuenta de que no llegábamos al corazón del grupo. Enviamos e-mails y cartas y no tuvimos respuesta, y fue ahí cuando le escribí al padre Fernando Montes, que había dejado de ser rector y sabía que estábamos haciendo esta investigación. Él nos apoyó: gracias a su gestión fuimos recibidos en sus casas, oficinas y pudimos tener muy buenas conversaciones con todos ellos.  

 –Uno de los hallazgos es que la élite chilena es muy homogénea, concentrada y con una capacidad de actuar como grupo que es superior a lo que pasa en otros países. ¿Por qué?
–La homogeneidad tiene que ver con su origen y la élite chilena tiene una escasa capacidad reflexiva, de autocrítica y de autobservación. En general, son ingenieros comerciales e ingenieros industriales que se forman en los mismos colegios y universidades. Me parece que hay un tema más ideológico, un universo simbólico muy automatizado, repetitivo y autocomplaciente que hace que el grupo se sienta muy orgulloso de sí mismo y de ser los “guardianes” de los chilenos.

–¿Cómo eso?
–Hay una idea de superioridad moral que se entiende cuando dicen “nosotros somos los que tenemos un talento especial, la responsabilidad de hacer las cosas bien y eso es un servicio al país”. La superioridad cognitiva aparece cuando plantean “sabemos lo que hay que hacer y tenemos el know how para hacerlo”.

–¿Cómo les llegan nuevas temáticas, como la agenda de género?  
–Frente al tema de género o a las brechas con las pymes pueden dar pequeñas señales de cambio, pero son cosméticas, porque cuando se sienten amenazados por un proceso en serio, como es una reforma tributaria, vuelve a imperar esa idea de consolidación de las posiciones y de la deslegitimación de otras posturas.

–¿Están preparados para una democratización efectiva?  
–Pueden aceptar a la democracia como un régimen político, pero entender al otro como un interlocutor válido, no. Comunicacionalmente no aceptan otra visión y eso se vio muy claro en las entrevistas.

–Y qué pasa con los hijos, ¿tienen una mirada más renovadora?
–Sí, claro. Después del estallido tuvieron expresiones en esa línea, pero no llegaron a establecerse como posturas mayoritarias, porque cuando toman decisiones clave repiten lo de siempre. Habría que ver qué pasa en diez años más con la incorporación de las mujeres en las empresas, pero nada garantiza que por ser mujer la élite va a cambiar su manera de ver el mundo. Puede haber cierto tono un poco más sensible, pero no soy tan optimista de creer que cierta cuota de diversidad cambiará el núcleo. Frente al estallido, por ejemplo, dijeron “aquí pasó algo que no funcionó, que tenemos que revisar”, y eso les duró unos meses. Cuando analizaron que, en el contexto de generar un cambio perderían privilegios, dijeron “hasta aquí no más llegamos” y se pusieron a la defensiva. 

 –O sea, ¿no ceden?
–Uno podría pensar que aprovecharían de mejor manera las crisis y que cedieran en algunas cosas. Pero no: quieren seguir liderando de la misma manera y esperan que revueltas como el estallido pasen y que el país continúe funcionando a su favor.  

–¿Qué es lo bueno de la élite chilena?  
–Es interesante cómo se constituyen con una identidad tan fuerte, eso es admirable y llama la atención, porque son capaces de mantener un proyecto consistente, con escasa fragmentación interna, sin grandes conflictos productivos ni políticos, si se compara con élites de otros países que son más complejas. Eso lo lograron durante la dictadura y tiene la virtud de hacer consistente el modelo que quieren, decidir qué política económica necesitan. Hay algo ahí ante lo que uno, como investigador, se saca el sombrero.

–¿Qué autocrítica hay tras los grandes escándalos de colusión donde se les apuntó como abusadores?
–Dicen “son unos pocos y no hay que enjuiciar a todo el empresariado, que es respetuoso, honesto y responsable”. Se comparan con el resto de la región y dicen cosas como “no somos corruptos como el empresariado argentino o peruano, acá respetamos la ley”.   

–En términos religiosos, ¿les funciona la culpa?
–Culpa colectiva, jamás. Ellos están convencidos de que son un aporte al país, que dan trabajo, que generan riqueza y que mejoraron el bienestar del país.

–¿Por qué es necesario que los chilenos leamos este libro y sepamos cómo piensa la élite?
–En términos políticos es necesario porque el empresariado es un actor con poder y capacidad de veto a cualquier proceso de reforma. Hay que entender que, frente a cualquier conmoción social, hay que dialogar con ellos; si se quiere cambiar el modelo, hay que hacer algo con ellos. Por eso hay que conocerlos, diagnosticar sus ventajas y sus desventajas, identificar sus logros, sus talentos y sus déficits. Y también reconocer su astucia y capacidad de contraataque, y estar prevenidos frente a eso.

–Por lo menos no se ocultan…
–Aparecen mucho en la prensa, sabemos quiénes son, están en la esfera pública y algunos tienen Twitter. Si comparamos esta forma de ser con la élite argentina, la chilena es muy identificable, porque en mi país (Argentina) es muy complejo saber dónde están y además nadie se define a sí mismo como un grupo dirigente. Acá, en cambio, se muestran como líderes del empresariado con poder ilimitado.

–Es bien pesimista lo que arroja este estudio: frente a la cantidad de hitos que han sacudido al país no tienen un esquema diferente.
–Lamentablemente, no. Y tomando en serio su discursividad moral, en algún momento, pensé que podría haber un mayor aprendizaje y una autocrítica. De verdad lo esperaba, pero quizás fuimos algo ingenuos en eso. La pregunta era qué capacidad tienen de aprovechar estos procesos para renovar liderazgos y la respuesta fue: no hay capacidad, hay escasa reflexividad y lo que esperan es que el país siga igual.  

Conservative commentator Peter Hitchens thinks the Nazis were leftists. His case doesn’t even begin to add up.

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In a column earlier this month for the Daily Mail, conservative commentator Peter Hitchens lamented that “no one seems to know” that the Nazis were “very left-wing.” He cites evidence like the high taxes the German middle class had to pay to support the war effort and the fact that the Nazis and the Soviets held an “amicable prisoner swap” during their short-lived pact in 1939.

None of this comes within ten thousand miles of establishing his conclusion. It’s worth spelling out why not, given that Hitchens is arguing for a conclusion common on the Right. At least he’s trying to make a historical case, instead of replying on the usual semantic argument that the Nazis called themselves “National Socialists” so they must have been socialists. (To see what’s wrong with that one, ask yourself whether the German Democratic Republic was a democracy.)

The Nazis imposed strictly socially conservative values on German society. Under their rule, workers who tried to organize for better conditions on the job were brutally repressed while politically connected capitalists grew fabulously wealthy from state contracts. And the German left was exterminated en masse.

None of that means that mainstream conservatives are Nazis. But it does make it absurd to deny that Adolf Hitler belonged to the extreme right.

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The History Hitchens Includes

A column announcing that “the Nazis were leftists, actually” is the kind of thing I’d expect from Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk, not Peter Hitchens. However alien I might find his deeply conservative worldview — Hitchens, the brother of former leftist Christopher, thinks atheism breeds immorality and worries about the dangers of legal cannabis — I expect someone as smart as him to do better than that.

But here’s a complete list of the facts he uses to bolster his case:

• According to Julia Boyd’s book Travelers in the Third Reich, many affluent German professionals you’d expect to enthusiastically support a right-wing government bitterly complained about the Nazis in private conversations.
• The Nazis were, “like all bad left-wing causes,” supported by many college students.
• Many ex-Communists renounced the KPD (the German Communist Party) and became supporters of the new regime.
• Hitler and Joseph Stalin were allies during the period between the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
• When the pact was signed, the two sides held a joint parade and a prisoner swap.
• Everyone in pictures from the prisoner swap looks happy.
• The Nazis imposed high taxes on the middle class.
• The Nazis imposed ideological indoctrination in the schools and encouraged children to turn against dissident — for example, socialist or communist — parents.

…and that’s it.

To state the painfully obvious: plenty of governments universally regarded as right-wing have been harshly criticized by a great many middle-class professionals. And every right-wing dictatorship that’s ever existed has been supported by pro-regime student groups.

The very first line of Martin Niemöller’s famous lamentation about not speaking out against the Nazi regime until it was too late was, “First, they came for the communists. . . .” Under those circumstances, of course many ex-Communists either got swept up in the patriotic hysteria or simply went over to the Nazis out of fear. The existence of such defectors isn’t remarkable. The remarkable part is that many Communists did keep their nerve.

Hitler and Stalin’s brief pact was widely regarded by leftists around the world as a shocking betrayal of socialist principles. If that agreement is evidence of Hitler’s left-wing credentials, surely the fact that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were mortal enemies for several years before the reversal is evidence that he wasn’t in fact left-wing. The same could be said of how Hitler used the lull of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to prepare for an all-out invasion of the Soviet Union — and that the Soviet Union paid a greater sacrifice in lost lives than any of its allies to defeat Hitler and the Nazis.

Of course a government preparing for global war imposed high taxes. Taxes also went up under the wartime government of Winston Churchill in the UK. (Though perhaps Churchill was a closet leftist, too — after all, he also entered an alliance with Stalin in 1941!)

Hitchens apparently thinks governments indoctrinating schoolchildren is inherently left-wing. Historically, the proposition that education should teach students critical thinking skills so they can make up their own minds about controversial issues has found many of its most enthusiastic supporters on the Left. Even so, I could grant Hitchens that imposing ideological indoctrination would be evidence of leftism — if the ideology students were being indoctrinated into was left-wing. But the Nazis’ indoctrination was all about patriotism, nationalism, racial superiority, and conventional gender roles.

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The History He Leaves Out

Perhaps knowing that these bits of information don’t add up to much, Hitchens offers up the far more dubious idea that the Nazis were fundamentally hostile to religion — and the outright falsehood that they were hostile to the family.

On religion, as Peter’s late brother, Christopher, liked to point out, there was quite a bit of collaboration between the Nazi regime and both the Catholic Church and major Protestant denominations. Prayers for the Führer were routinely said during church services, and Hitler often appealed to Christian imagery in his speeches. Nazi soldiers had “Gott Mitt Uns” (God With Us) emblazoned on their belt buckles.

It’s true the Nazis feared both Catholic and major Protestant churches as one of the only alternative centers of power remaining in an increasingly Nazified society, that they often sought to assert greater control over the churches, and that officially sanctioned versions of Christian theology were often Nazified to the point where any standard-issue Christian abroad would see them as heretical. But if a government is “anti-religion” if it engages in a power struggle with church officials and insists on beliefs that Christians elsewhere would regard as heretical, then King Henry VIII, who founded the Church of England, was also “anti-religion.”

And even when we turn from the policies of the Nazi regime to the beliefs of those high-ranking Nazis who preferred “Völkisch” paganism to Christianity, it’s hard to see what this has to do with the Nazis being “very left-wing.” Historically, various socialist and communist governments have taken attitudes toward religion ranging from disastrous attempts to impose atheism to a sensible adherence to the separation between church and state — but I’ve never heard of one that wanted to replace Christianity with the worship of Odin.

Finally, when it comes to the family, Peter Hitchens simply has no case. “Very left-wing” governments have no monopoly on the grotesque tactic of encouraging children to inform on anti-regime parents. And as for the Nazis’ attitude toward family relationships in general, they were so “left-wing” they revived a slogan from the era of Kaiser Wilhelm about the proper role of women — “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, church, kitchen) — and systematically excluded women from public life. Gay people were sent to death camps.

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Hitler and Stalin

Any time the Nazis did something that contemporary conservatives generally oppose — like increasing taxes — Hitchens takes this as evidence that they couldn’t have been right-wing. Oddly, he doesn’t apply this methodology in the other direction. The Left cares deeply about racial equality, but he argues that the Nazis’ fanatical embrace of an ideology of racial superiority — and indeed, the Third Reich’s outright extermination of Jewish and Roma people — doesn’t count as evidence that the Nazis weren’t left-wing. But why not?

Hitchens writes that Stalin was also an antisemite and that some of the purges against supposed counterrevolutionaries particularly targeted Jews. In the same spirit, he’s argued in exchanges with historians who objected to his Daily Mail article that the Nazis’ extermination of German Communists doesn’t substantiate the claim that the Nazis were “very left-wing” because Stalin also killed lots of Communists.

He also repeats two standard right-wing attempts to smear socialists more generally as antisemitic — he says that Marx was an antisemite, and he insinuates that leftists who speak out against Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinians are antisemitic. I’ve responded to these claims elsewhere. But what about the comparisons between Hitler and Stalin?

One obvious point is that killing Communists who were accused (often falsely) of opposition to Stalin is a far cry from Hitler killing people because they were Communists. The Spanish Inquisition killed many Spanish Christians, but Christianity wasn’t illegal in sixteenth-century Spain.

And a far more important point is that Stalin’s consolidation of power in the Soviet Union represented a conservative turn — at least by the standards of a state that had emerged from a successful socialist revolution. Leon Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, vividly summed up what this looked like:

Revolutionary internationalism gives way to the cult of the fatherland in the strictest sense. And the fatherland means, above all, the authorities. Ranks, decorations and titles have been reintroduced. The officer caste headed by the marshals has been reestablished. The old communist workers are pushed into the background; the working class is divided into different layers.

Commenting on this passage, Alex Skopic notes that if anything, Sedov is considerably understating the last point. The revolution had originally promised workers’ control of factories. By the 1930s, Stalin had enacted criminal penalties for “absenteeism.”

Along with autocratic workplaces, the Stalin era witnessed a revival of anti-Jewish prejudice (Stalin himself was a bigot) and the prohibition of abortion and homosexuality, both of which had been legalized in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Would Peter Hitchens regard this as evidence that there’s nothing conservative about opposition to abortion or same-sex marriage? I seriously doubt it.

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Christopher Hitchens’s Judgment

Even after his politics moved right, Christopher Hitchens was too intellectually honest to compare leftists to fascists.

In 2002, his close friend Martin Amis published a book about Stalin called Koba the Dread arguing that Stalin should be condemned just as severely as Hitler and that everyone in the West who supported the Russian Revolution deserved denunciation. Writing in an open letter to Amis published in the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens pointed out that this “attempted syllogism” would suggest that, for example, many of the “hard left” types who worked with Martin Luther King Jr were the moral equivalent of Nazis.

His response to Amis nicely doubles as a response to his brother’s attempt to transfer Hitler from the far right to the far left:

My provisional critique of this ahistorical reasoning would fit into three short italicised sentences. Don’t. Be. Silly.

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Emily Brontë is one of the most uniquely brilliant women writers who ever lived, the perfect subject for a feminist biopic. She deserves better than the shallow pop feminism of the new movie Emily.

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If you’re aware of the film Emily, the new biopic of writer Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, it’s probably because it’s doing surprisingly solid business for a modestly budgeted period piece and is being widely lauded by critics and delighted audience members. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times praises the film by saying approvingly that it “takes a frisky approach to its source material.”

Let’s just pause here to consider this statement. The film represents a “frisky approach” to the life of Emily Brontë. “Frisky.” FRISKY. If there’s one word that should never be applied to the searing, tragic, yet magnificent life of Emily Brontë — or, hell, any Brontë — it’s “frisky.”

But Dargis isn’t wrong in this descriptive term, because if you don’t know much of anything about Emily Brontë and you see this new film, you’ll get the impression she was an irreligious, sexy minx with fetchingly tousled hair who screwed her father’s cute curate (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in the barn after he’d counseled her to learn to love nature in order to endure her drab life in her father’s parsonage on the moors. You’ll also get the impression that Emily (Emma Mackey of Sex Education) was enabled to write the thunderous Gothic novel Wuthering Heights because of her hot, forbidden love life. That, plus her experiences running around the moors high on opiates with her wild brother Brandon (Fionn Whitehead of Dunkirk).

And you’ll discover that Emily’s father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë (Adrian Dunbar), was a mean, cold bastard, making all the sisters go to church and overstrain themselves acquiring scholarly accomplishments so they could get themselves hired out as teachers and governesses. For no reason at all!

You’ll also find out that Emily’s sensational book, which was followed immediately by her death at age thirty, inspired her prissy sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) to get down off her high horse and write Jane Eyre. As for Anne Brontë (Amelia Gething), she never did anything interesting.

That’s pretty much the level actor Frances O’Connor is working on in making her film debut as writer-director of this version of Emily Brontë’s life story, which amounts to cinematic libel. Critics write breathlessly about O’Connor’s important experiences as an actor in period literary adaptations giving her the chops to tackle this subject so fearlessly. Specifically, O’Connor starred in a loose and extremely frisky adaptation of Mansfield Park in 1999, playing the lead role of Fanny Price as a healthy, outspoken extrovert — the opposite qualities of the character of Fanny Price as written by Jane Austen.

If you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember that the final scene involves Fanny getting a tattoo of her love Edmund’s name on her ass. So you can see where O’Connor got her ideas about adapting nineteenth-century women-centered literature.

One of the few disapproving reviews of Emily, by Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, states:

O’Connor, an actress . . . making her directorial debut, calls upon [Emma] Mackey to evoke and embody Emily Brontë while furnishing her with a life and personality entirely different from that of the famous author. This is an impossible task. Forget about writing “Wuthering Heights”; I don’t believe this Emily could read it.

It’s not that there are no good aspects to the film. The cinematography by Nanu Segal is beautiful and memorable at points. For example, the scene in which curate William Weightman is striding across the moors to keep a tryst with Emily waiting in the barn, and the image of him is framed by a barn window. The shots cut back and forth between the palpitating Emily and the approaching curate, with each shot of him bringing William farther forward than the time-frame would seem to allow, creating a surging shock effect that reflects her own emotions.

And the most memorable scene, shot in moody shadows, involves a guessing game featuring an eerie white mask and the challenge of the wearer evoking a chosen personality the others have to guess at. Emily puts it on and seems to summon the spirit of the Brontë children’s long-dead mother in a way that terrifies and overwhelms them.

But such effects can’t make up for a basically silly approach to the material. There’s a framing question in Emily, posed by the pinched prig sister Charlotte while Emily Brontë lies on her deathbed: “How did you write Wuthering Heights?”

The long answer is in flashback. The other disapproving review of the film points out,

One bad idea presides over Emily, sapping its better moments of their originality. That idea is one that often comes up in films about writers: the notion that no one could possibly write well about something they hadn’t experienced directly. The 2007 movie Becoming Jane assured its viewers that Jane Austen was only able to produce so many great novels about young women finding true love because she had attained and (unlike her heroines) lost it herself. . . . [But] romantic love is arguably the predominate theme of Western literature and culture, especially the parts of it with which the Brontës were familiar. It’s not as if they (or anyone else) needed first-hand experience to know anything about extravagant passion, given how much, and how widely, they read.

Nevertheless, this is the stupid question that has long preoccupied literary critics and readers ever since the book was first published under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell. The qualities of the book that shocked people — its ferocity, rawness of emotion, perceived coarseness and violence, and heretical views — were the very ones that made many people sure it was “a man’s book,” impossible for a fragile, gentle, unworldly woman to have written. You’ll still occasionally run across some moron claiming that Wuthering Heights must’ve been written by Branwell Brontë because it’s simply too powerful a book to have been written by a woman. This view was satirized in the 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, in which the heroine is pestered by a tiresome Bohemian pedant who’s writing a book called Pard-Spirit: A Study of Branwell Brontë, claiming that “it’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could’ve written that. It’s male stuff.”

Emily achieves its own kind of idiocy that’s all the more distressing for the way it is getting credit for presenting Emily Brontë afresh.

It’s to the Bohemian’s claim that “his sisters hated him because of his genius” and conspired to take the credit from Branwell. While he slaved away fifteen hours a day writing all their novels, they slandered him as a drunken wreck in order to hide their own dipsomania from the public.

The film Emily isn’t quite that extravagant in its reimagining of what was going on in the lives of the Brontë family when it comes to explaining their authorship. Yet it achieves its own kind of idiocy that’s all the more distressing for the way the film is getting credit for presenting Emily Brontë afresh, as a feminist figure, as if she hadn’t been considered a feminist figure for generations. But this is the new, improved pop feminism, now with extra spunk! And we know what that means. Some generically victimized woman character will “find her voice,” experience a sexual awakening, lean in, persist, and show her male oppressors they were wrong to underestimate her.

The worst of it is, Emily Brontë is one of the most uniquely brilliant women who ever lived, the perfect subject for a feminist biopic.

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The Historical Brontë

The Brontë sisters finding a way to express themselves so fully and brilliantly and shockingly, despite the cruel gender and class constrictions of their lives, makes them merit serious biographies by great feminist filmmakers. They created relatively few literary works — their obsessive, intricately plotted, world-building juvenilia, written from childhood on (with their brother Branwell); a jointly published book of poetry written under their male pseudonyms of Ellis, Currer, and Acton Bell; and a small armload of novels, written in a white heat of productivity in their short lives. Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Gray were accepted for publication earlier, while Charlotte’s initial effort, The Professor, was turned down. But her second novel, Jane Eyre, was accepted and published so rapidly, it was made public before any of the others — and created a sensation.

Once her identity was discovered, the book made Charlotte Brontë so renowned that her fame cast a fainter but still lurid glow on her sisters’ works as well. And if many found Jane Eyre rather shocking, Wuthering Heights was a scandal.

Ultimately, all of the sisters wrote great novels — Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and her brilliantly modernist Villette, and Anne’s unjustly neglected The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, can stand alongside Emily’s fiercely written Wuthering Heights on any shelf. But when it comes to amazing lives, though all were interesting women, Emily towers above the others. She was so strong that, far from being victimized by the restrictions placed on women’s lives in early nineteenth-century England, she forged a solitary path for herself through a secret door of her own making to find freedom within apparently narrow domestic entrapment. Her own siblings found her mysterious and a little scary.

The key story of Emily’s life is the one about her having been attacked by a possibly rabid dog. Her response was to come home, heat a knife blade to a searing temperature, and stoically cauterize her own wound.

No one had to counsel Emily to love nature — it was her leading characteristic. People who knew her reported that she would come home from long walks on the moors with her face almost transfigured by ecstasy, as of one who’d been in direct contact with the sublime. Her primary relationships beyond her immediate family — she was especially close to her sister Anne — were with animals. Her dog Keeper was described as practically her twin soul, and she frequently returned home with injured animals, or lost baby animals, that she’d raise and rehabilitate herself.

Given this, the complete lack of animals in the heroine’s life in Emily is an astounding omission. In fact, judging from the film, almost all animal life has been eradicated from 1840s Yorkshire.

Emily Brontë would never have said anything so ridiculous as Emily’s line in the film about being trapped in her narrow, dreary life on the moors. The greatest thing that ever happened to her was being relieved of the burden of having to go out into the world to earn a living, as the other Brontë children had to do. And far from having to be rebuked by her sister Charlotte for her idle ways, as happens in the film (“Don’t be a burden, Emily”), she took her responsibilities so seriously, she wouldn’t give up fulfilling her household duties while she was desperately ill from tuberculosis, even when her family begged her to lie down. She only laid down to die.

It was an urgent matter for Patrick, shared by the Brontë children, that they all, including the girls, be trained for working lives, because his house and income would be lost upon his death. This became an even more pressing matter when Branwell failed to establish himself in any of the careers he attempted, including artist, writer, tutor, and stationmaster — he soon fell into dissolute habits, depression, illness, and early death. The sisters had no other financial resources and, faced with the prospect of having no father or brother to support them, the great fear was that they’d all be left destitute. It was one of the tragic ironies of the Brontë family that Patrick outlived all his children by many years.

Charlotte and Anne endured for a while the grinding misery of lives as governesses and low-level teachers, positions that often earned one very little respect from affluent adults or their children. These harsh experiences informed their novels. Meanwhile, though Emily was tasked with running the household, she was also enabled to spend hours on most days of her life roaming her beloved moors and writing extraordinary literary works. She’s considered the only great poet in the Brontë family.

Emily couldn’t endure “society.” Though an excellent scholar, she failed in her few agonizing attempts to get the formal education required to train for a job as teacher or governess, because she found life among strangers insupportable. Its virtually disabling effects upon her are dramatized in the film. She couldn’t withstand the regimentation and restrictions and suffocating self-consciousness of public life. “Freedom was the breath of life to her,” Charlotte wrote of her, and she found that freedom on the moors and in her own writing.

Yet critics are buying wholesale the film’s idea that Emily was a woman whose whole life was pathetically crabbed and unfulfilled:

Despite writing one of the most rugged and enduring novels in all English literature before her 30th — and final — birthday, Emily Brontë spent the whole of her life in a suffocating environment that saw her brilliant imagination dampened at every turn.

If only my imagination could be one-tenth as undampened as Emily Brontë’s! Here’s a passage from Wuthering Heights conveying the intensity of vision and feeling she could summon. In it, her anti-heroine Cathy recounts her blasphemous dream of dying, going to heaven, and then rejecting the realm of God in favor of the moors:

Heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth, and the angels grew so angry that they flung me out onto the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke to sob for joy.

Writing that is kind of a big deal for the daughter of an Irish-born Anglican priest, by the way.

Not that any of this will matter to the majority of people who want to go see this film, I have to acknowledge. It’s enraging, but as far as I can tell, the simple version of complex, compelling subject matter is ever more preferred. Nobody much cares that Emily Brontë was nothing like this doofus portrayed in Emily, or that a wiser, more visceral, less falsely pretty film based on the actual life of the woman would be a hundred times more thrilling. The swoony romance, the dopey explanation for literary achievement, the fake feminism — people like that stuff. In this case, I write for the tiny minority of possible viewers who have some sort of investment in the Brontë sisters and their writing and can still be warned off.

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Latin America is known for its large cemeteries with its grand architecture, and El Cementerio General (the General Cemetery) is among the greatest of these. Spanning 86 hectares, the cemetery is not only the largest in Chile but also one of the largest in South America. Over 2 million people are interred in the cemetery. (For reference, the population of Santiago is about 7 million.)

El Cementerio General was founded in 1821 by the man who led Chile to independence and became the country’s first leader, Bernardo O’Higgins. The oldest part of the cemetery is its southern end, which has been designated a national monument. A domed gatehouse was built on the south side of the cemetery facing the semicircular Plaza La Paz, and two arched arcades run along the perimeter of the plaza. The area near the gatehouse contains most of the oldest graves and architecture in the cemetery, including many ornate mausoleums for many of Chilean history’s wealthiest families, while the northern side of the cemetery contains many newer graves and rows of modern multi-story buildings with niches for more average modern-day Chileans. Several much larger structures are interspersed across the cemetery, including the neoclassical Capilla Verde and the modern multi-story Mausoleo Italiano.

O’Higgins’s intention was for the cemetery to honor Chile’s greatest people, and many famous Chileans have indeed been interred in the cemetery. Most of Chile’s former presidents have been interred in the cemetery, although the 20th-century dictator Augusto Pinochet is notably absent, and quite a few other famous Chilean politicians, writers, academics, and entertainers are also buried here.

However, the memorials for the individual and collective victims of the Pinochet dictatorship attract the most attention. Salvador Allende, who committed suicide during the coup d’etat led by Pinochet, had originally been buried in Viña del Mar, but his remains were exhumed and interred in a new monument built at the center of Cementerio General in 1990. The large Memorial del Detenido Desaparecido y del Ejecutado Político (Memorial for the Disappeared) commemorates the people who were either “disappeared” or executed by the Pinochet dictatorship, and a section of the north end of the cemetery named Patio 29 contains the graves of anonymous individuals who were executed during the early years of the dictatorship, all of which are marked with simple metal crosses.

Today, the cemetery serves as not only the final resting place for many Chileans but also as an open-air museum honoring the greatest people in Chilean history. It attracts not only the families of people who have passed away but visitors from both Chile and abroad who want to learn more about the country’s past.

Malaysia has a rich history and diverse culture, which includes a variety of supernatural beliefs and folklore. It is not uncommon to hear stories of ghostly encounters or haunted places in the country. 

For those who are interested in exploring the paranormal, there are several haunted spots in Malaysia that are worth visiting.

1. Kellie’s Castle 

One of the most famous haunted spots in Malaysia is Kellie’s Castle in Perak. This unfinished mansion was built in the early 20th century by Scottish planter William Kellie Smith, who intended it to be a home for his family. However, construction was halted due to his untimely death, and the castle has remained abandoned ever since. 

Visitors have reported hearing strange noises and feeling a sense of unease while exploring the castle.

Location: 5, Jalan Gopeng, 31000 Batu Gajah, Perak, Malaysia

2. Highland Tower 

Another popular haunted spot in Malaysia is the Highland Towers in Selangor. This condominium complex was hit by a landslide in 1993, which killed 48 people and left the remaining buildings abandoned. There have been reports of ghostly sightings and eerie occurrences at the site, which has since become a popular spot for ghost hunters.

Location: Taman Hillview, Ulu Klang, Selangor, Malaysia.

3. Villa Nabila 

The Bukit Tunku area in Kuala Lumpur is also known for its haunted spots. The most famous of these is the Villa Nabila, which was once a grand mansion owned by a wealthy family. However, the family reportedly fled the house after experiencing supernatural phenomena, and it has been abandoned ever since. Visitors have reported seeing apparitions and hearing strange noises while exploring the property.

Other notable haunted spots in Malaysia include the Penang War Museum, the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Malacca, and the Rafflesia Pudu Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

If you’re interested in exploring Malaysia’s haunted spots, it’s important to exercise caution and respect for the supernatural. These places are not just tourist attractions, but they also have a cultural and spiritual significance for many Malaysians. It’s also important to note that some of these places may be off-limits or restricted for safety reasons, so it’s best to do your research beforehand and seek permission before visiting.

4. Mona Fandey’s House 

Mona Fandey, also known as Maznah Ismail, was a Malaysian pop singer-turned-bomoh. She was born on January 1, 1956, in the state of Perlis. Mona Fandey’s life took a dark turn when she met a politician named Mazlan Idris, who hired her to perform black magic rituals for him to improve his political career.

In 1993, Mona Fandey and her husband, Mohamad Affandi Abdul Rahman, murdered Mazlan Idris in a ritualistic killing at their home. They claimed that the murder was part of a black magic ritual intended to help Mazlan Idris achieve political success. 

Mona Fandey and her husband were arrested and found guilty of the murder. They were sentenced to death by hanging and were executed in 2001.

Her last words, “Saya tidak akan mati,” which means “I will never die,” are forever etched in Malaysian crime history and folklore.

Pictured above was one of the houses that she lived in and is a favourite for paranormal seekers. 

Location: Seksyen 12, Shah Alam, Malaysia

5. Shih Chung Branch School

The Shih Chung Branch School in Penang, Malaysia, is known for its chilling history of ghostly hauntings. The school was built in 1880 and was once used as administrative headquarters by the ruling Japanese military during World War II. 

There have been disturbing stories about dark events that allegedly occurred on the site during the Japanese occupation. According to legend, many people were tortured and executed within the building, and their souls are still there today. As a result, many consider the place ‘haunted’.

One of the most well-known ghost stories associated with the Shih Chung Branch School is that of a headless ghost that haunts the stairwell. Legend has it that a soldier was beheaded on the stairs during the war, and his spirit still roams the area.

Location: 11, Jalan Transfer, George Town, 10050 George Town, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia

6. Amber Court

Amber Court was constructed as a resort and is located in Genting Highlands next to the First World Hotel. However, due to the 1997-1998 financial crisis, it was converted into apartments. The vacant apartments and the red algae spots on the building walls that resemble blood stains give it an eerie appearance.

It became a well-liked dark tourism destination because of its reputation as one of Malaysia’s haunted locations. This place is filled with eerie tales of suicides and supernatural occurrences. It is accessible as a homestay for truth-seeking, brave people. Many visitors have related a variety of tales, including those involving a headless woman, howling, and door-slamming sounds.

Location: Amber Court, Jalan Ion D’Elemen, Genting Highlands, Pahang, Malaysia

7. Mimaland

Mimaland was a popular theme park located in Ulu Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia. It was opened in 1971 and quickly became a popular attraction for locals and tourists alike. The park featured various rides and attractions, including a water park, roller coasters, and carnival games.

In 1993, a tragic accident occurred where a 27-year-old Singaporean was killed while using the giant slide at the Mimaland pool. The park was plagued with safety issues and incidents that eventually led to its closure. 

Today, the area where Mimaland once stood has been abandoned for many years, with the remnants of the park left to decay. The abandoned park has become a popular spot for urban explorers and photographers seeking to capture the eerie and haunting atmosphere of the abandoned theme park.

Location: Jalan Gombak, 53100, Selangor, Malaysia

Do note that if you’re interested in visiting these places, you should proceed with caution and respect. It would also be good to check if you’re trespassing on private property before entering.

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El periodista español y doctor en Historia Mario Amorós presentará este miércoles, en Santiago, su biografía sobre el trovador y director teatral Víctor Jara (1932-1973), La vida es eterna.

Allí narra su infancia en el mundo rural, cuando su madre, Amanda, le dio a conocer la música de los campesinos; su juventud en la humilde población Los Nogales de Santiago, los días en un seminario católico, el servicio militar en el Ejército y su incorporación a la vanguardista Escuela de Teatro de la Universidad de Chile; además, la consagración como director teatral, su relación de amor con Joan Turner y su vida familiar.

El evento se realizará en el Centro Cultural de España (Av. Providencia 927, Providencia), a las 19:30 horas.

Antecedentes

Amorós tiene un antiguo vínculo con Chile y ha publicado varias biografías de personajes del país, como el Presidente Salvador Allende, el dictador Augusto Pinochet, el líder revolucionario Miguel Enríquez y el poeta Pablo Neruda.

El investigador entró en contacto con la figura del trovador en su primer viaje a Chile, en 1997, cuando leyó el libro Un canto truncado, de la viuda del artista, Joan Jara, a quien luego entrevistó junto a otros personajes, como Eugenia «Kena» Arrieta y el maestro de la danza Patricio Bunster.

Cuenta asimismo que un gran amigo suyo militó junto con Jara en las Juventudes Comunistas y luego estuvo preso con él en el Estadio Chile (hoy Estadio Víctor Jara).

De hecho, el autor ya había dedicado al cantante un capítulo de su libro Después de la lluvia. Chile, la memoria herida (2004, Cuarto Propio).

Legado creador

Entre otros asuntos, Mario Amorós relata la difícil decisión que debió tomar Jara para optar entre sus dos pasiones: la música y el teatro.

«Me parece una persona que nos ha dejado un legado creador y el recuerdo de un compromiso político y social admirable», comenta el autor, quien para su investigación indagó en archivos de varios países.

Entre otros, al rescatar las entrevistas que otorgó dentro y fuera de Chile, «donde él reflexionó sobre su trabajo como creador, explica el origen de sus principales discos» y también saber cómo Víctor Jara vivía y sentía el proceso de la Unidad Popular.

«Creo que he logrado presentar una biografía que ofrece una mirada con muchos aspectos inéditos sobre la vida» y también sobre su asesinato, señala el autor.

Entre otros datos, revela –a partir de su certificado de nacimiento– que Jara nació en Santiago y no en el sur de Chile, como se creía.

Artista heterodoxo

Otro de los elementos del libro es que presenta a Víctor Jara como un artista heterodoxo y nada dogmático, siempre abierto a nuevas influencias artísticas y culturales.

«Creo que todo creador tiene que tener una mentalidad abierta, porque, si no, no progresa», explica junto con destacar la breve carrera musical de Jara, de apenas siete años (1966-1973).

«Ahí hay una evolución muy clara, desde las primeras canciones, como ‘El cigarrillo’ hasta ‘Pongo en tus manos abiertas’, de claro compromiso político, junto con un retorno al folclore en 1973. Él rompió moldes en el teatro, muy bien valorado en su época, que viaja a Inglaterra en 1968 con una beca del British Council con Los Beatles y los aspectos más innovadores del teatro británico, que quiso llevar a Chile. En el terreno musical hubo no solo una permanente exploración –por ejemplo, en ‘El derecho de vivir en paz’, con las guitarras eléctricas de Los Blops–, sino una permanente reflexión sobre su trabajo y el rumbo de su compromiso».

Amorós además destaca el compromiso de Víctor Jara con la Unidad Popular a través de sus cartas, algunas inéditas, lo que explica que el 11 de septiembre se haya dirigido a su lugar de trabajo en la ex Universidad Técnica del Estado (hoy USACH).

Asimismo, a partir de más de 11 mil páginas del proceso judicial sobre su asesinato el 15 de septiembre en el ex Estadio Chile (hoy Estadio Víctor Jara), también reconstruyó sus últimos días, gracias a testimonios judiciales de conscriptos y otros militares.

Consagración

Para Amorós, Jara –que alcanzó a realizar giras a países como Argentina, Perú, Venezuela, México, Cuba y la Unión Soviética– ya era un artista consagrado en Chile cuando fue asesinado, pero tras su muerte esto se extendió al mundo.

«Sus canciones adquieren un significado diferente después del golpe de Estado en Chile y de su cruel asesinato. Se convierte en uno de los símbolos de la tragedia de Chile, junto con el Presidente Salvador Allende», cuyas canciones serán interpretadas por Silvio Rodríguez, Joan Manuel Serrat e Ismael Serrano.

Respecto a la fuerza que volvió a tomar su legado durante el estallido, como con la masiva difusión de su canción «El derecho de vivir en paz», Amorós cree que sus composiciones perduran por su calidad.

Canciones como»Manifiesto», «Te recuerdo Amanda» o «Luchín» son «canciones que, a pesar de que uno las ha escuchado tantas veces, nos siguen conmoviendo, nos siguen emocionando».

«Es una creación que alcanza la belleza, que nos habla del compromiso. Es una figura presente en Chile, presente en el mundo por la calidad de su creación y su compromiso al que fue leal hasta el último instante de su vida», concluye.

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The Silk Road facilitated trade from Asia to Europe and vice versa for more than a millennium. Find out why its fabric finally started to fray.

Un documental con los testimonios de las mujeres de los presos políticos de la dictadura militar en el campo de concentración de isla Dawson, en la Región de Magallanes, tendrá su preestreno este jueves.

Se trata de Las Dawsonianas, del director Roberto Riveros Jiménez, protagonizado, entre otras, por Moy de Tohá, Isabel Morel Gumucio, Lily Castillo, Irma Cáceres, Kenny Hirmas, Adriana Rondón González, Elisa Cruz, Angélica Silva, Angélica Beas, Mercedes Costa, Lila Ojalvo y Moira Lavanderos.

«Es un relato íntimo desde dentro del poder, sobre cómo un grupo de mujeres se une y enfrenta a la cúpula golpista, incluyendo al mismo Pinochet en persona», explica su realizador.

Producido por los periodistas Angélica Beas Millas y Sergio Campos, el documental debutó en el Circuito de Festivales con una Nominación a Mejor Tráiler, en TMFF – The Monthly Film Festival, evento realizado el 30 de diciembre 2022, en la Ciudad de Glasgow, Inglaterra.

La cinta será exhibida a las 16:00 horas en el Aula Magna de la Universidad Central (Lord Cochrane 418, Metro Parque Almagro), por invitación de dicha casa de estudios, el equipo de producción del documental y Cintamani Films.

Torturas a autoridades

Tras el derrocamiento del Gobierno constitucional del Presidente Salvador Allende, hecho del cual se cumplen 50 años este 11 de septiembre, la dictadura del general Augusto Pinochet creó diversos campos de concentración en el norte (Pisagua, Chacabuco), el centro (Puchuncaví) y el sur del país.

La isla Dawson fue el destino de las principales autoridades de la época. Allí estuvieron detenidos, entre otros, el exministro de Defensa José Tohá, quien falleció en 1974 en extrañas circunstancias en el Hospital Militar de Santiago; el excanciller Orlando Letelier, luego expulsado al exilio y asesinado en Washington en 1976; el excanciller Clodomiro Almeida, todos ellos socialistas, así como el jefe del Partido Comunista, Luis Corvalán, y el Premio Nacional de Arquitectura Miguel Lawner, donde sufrieron torturas, malos tratos y vejaciones.

Según sus creadores, el documental emerge como un relato coral de un grupo de mujeres que se enfrentó a la dictadura de Pinochet desde sus primeras horas, y que se convirtió en un referente articulado de oposición frontal a la misma.

Además de productora, Angélica Beas también es una de las protagonistas del documental. Su situación fue muy especial, porque en 1972 se había separado de Carlos Jorquera, jefe de prensa de Salvador Allende, quien acompañó al Presidente hasta el último momento el 11 de septiembre en La Moneda, «en una decisión de lealtad y coherencia impecable».

«Por lo tanto, no dudé ni un minuto en asumir el rol de esposa. No hacerlo me habría parecido imperdonable, era el padre de mis hijas. Pasan los años y sigo creyendo que no podría haber hecho otra cosa», cuenta.

Ella relata que en el documental hay muchas experiencias diversas desde el punto de vista personal, «pero todas convergen en la idea de salvar la vida a un puñado de hombres que buscaron servir a los chilenos desde el ejercicio del poder democrático», en una «narración coral de un grupo de mujeres, quienes a partir del recuerdo de cada una, van construyendo un relato común de una historia que fue compartida por todas las mujeres cuyos maridos fueron confinados».

Cruzada peligrosa

Riveros es documentalista y académico de la UCEN, que contó con el Laboratorio Audiovisual UCEN como equipo realizador para su obra. Anteriormente abordó este tema en su filme La reunión, memorias de Dawson, de 2018.

Tal como en aquel, en este documental las protagonistas son las esposas y exesposas de algunos de los hombres que conformaron el círculo más cercano a Salvador Allende y que, en septiembre de 1973, fueron hechos prisioneros y trasladados a isla Dawson.

«Hablamos de personajes como Victoria Morales Etchevers, madre de la actual ministra del Interior Carolina Tohá y viuda del exministro de Defensa José Tohá, asesinado en 1974. O Isabel Morel Gumucio, madre del exsenador Juan Pablo Letelier y viuda del exministro de Relaciones Exteriores Orlando Letelier, asesinado en 1976», cuenta.

«Ellas, al buscar a sus maridos y proteger a sus familias, se ven envueltas en una cruzada peligrosa que las convierte en activistas de oposición a la dictadura y, también, a la cultura patriarcal imperante en la época y el mundo militar. Sus acciones tuvieron alcance internacional», destaca.

Romper el cerco mediático

Para Beas, el objetivo de la cinta tiene que ver con dos ejes centrales: rescatar la memoria trayéndola al presente y contar una historia que merecía ser contada.

«Durante los primeros meses de la dictadura, el bloqueo mediático fue extraordinariamente feroz; hombres y mujeres eran detenidos sin que se supiera su paradero, se asesinaba a mansalva a gente de izquierda y nada de eso aparecía en los medios de comunicación nacional. En eso, me atrevo a decir que ‘las Dawsonianas’ tuvimos un rol bien significativo, porque logramos romper cercos e informarle al mundo lo que estaba pasando», relata.

Algunas de ellas conocían el mundo militar por los cargos que habían ejercido sus maridos; otras poseían vínculos con gobiernos y embajadas, otras tenían profesiones con contactos con diarios de otros países.

«Todo eso nos permitió enfrentar a los militares sin darles tregua, a pesar de las amenazas, detenciones y múltiples hostigamientos a los que fuimos sometidas», recuerda Beas.

«Muchas de nosotras no teníamos mayor vinculación política partidaria, salvo la adhesión al Gobierno de la Unidad Popular. Pero había otras, como Lily de Corvalán e Irma Almeyda que sí tenían una mirada política y nos orientaban. También mujeres como Moy de Tohá o Isabel Margarita de Letelier, quienes conocían a Pinochet y a otros militares con quienes tuvieron duros enfrentamientos. Cada una jugó un rol y entre todas nos repartíamos las tareas. Nos reuníamos  una vez por semana, generalmente en casa de Cecilia Bachelet de Miranda, que tenía una pieza aislada para que los niños no nos oyeran. Ahí planificábamos las gestiones que debíamos hacer y cada una proponía ideas, inquietudes y sobre todo nos dábamos fuerza». 

Beas explica que tuvo muchas razones para participar en la cinta, «pero probablemente porque nunca dejé de recordar lo que una noche me dijo Gabriel García Márquez durante mi exilio en México: ‘Tú eres periodista y como tal tienes el deber de dejar registro de lo que fueron las Dawsonianas’. Era una deuda pendiente y yo pensaba escribir un libro».

«Un día comenté esto frente a Sergio Campos y él me propuso que en vez de un libro hiciéramos un documental. Me ofreció la ayuda de la Universidad Central, de los alumnos de Periodismo y la experiencia del cineasta Roberto Riveros», detalla.

Así fue como ella empezó a llamar a las «amigas Dawsonianas» y proponerles la idea.

«No siempre fue fácil porque muchas no querían tener que recordar. Pero también comprendieron que sus testimonios ayudarían a conocer la historia  para dejárselas a los más jóvenes», acota.

Fueron agendando las entrevistas –que hizo Sergio Campos– y el equipo de filmación iba a la casa de cada una y recogiendo los recuerdos.

Salvaguardar la memoria

Por su parte, el cineasta pretende contribuir a la salvaguarda de la memoria histórica de Chile, «labor donde todas las voces debiesen ser rescatadas, conservadas y difundidas, pues, para luchar contra la impunidad, es fundamental recordar».

«Otro objetivo fue centrarnos en el relato de las mujeres de manera íntima y comprometida, con un equipo joven compuesto principalmente por mujeres, quienes conectaron y construyeron una mirada compleja sobre los eventos, con perspectiva de género y desde el presente», cuenta.

La historia le llegó a través de la periodista Angélica Beas y el periodista Sergio Campos, quienes sintieron la inquietud de contar sobre las Dawsonianas, antes de que fuera demasiado tarde, pues muchas de sus protagonistas son mayores, agrega.

Riveros además considera a La reunión, memorias de Dawson como una versión preliminar de Las Dawsonianas, que se mostró en 2018 y que luego «quedó atrapada entre revuelta social y pandemia».

El año pasado, junto al equipo de Cintámani Films, el realizador decidió relanzar el documental este 2023, con un nombre más apropiado, musicalización y diseño sonoro nuevo hecho por artistas magallánicos encabezados por Cristián Cárdenas e, incluso, un tema inédito compuesto e interpretado por Colombina Parra para el documental.

Terrorismo de Estado

Anteriormente, Riveros además filmó La resistencia de los metales (2016), que habla del campo de concentración de Chacabuco. ¿Por qué le interesa el tema del terrorismo de Estado?

«Creo que el terrorismo de Estado y fundamentalmente la impunidad, es una cruz que arrastra el país de manera dolorosa. Se instaló como definición de Chile hasta el día de hoy. Ya lo decía Violeta Parra en una de sus canciones: ‘Chile limita al centro de la injusticia'», comenta el cineasta.

«La memoria es una manera de combatir la impunidad. El Estado de Chile ha ratificado tratados internacionales sobre derechos humanos donde garantiza el derecho a la memoria de todos los ciudadanos, justamente para que no se repitan los crímenes del pasado. Sin embargo, en lo concreto, a la memoria se la lleva el tiempo y, en el caso de Chacabuco, exsalitrera y campo de concentración donde se filmó La resistencia de los metales, se la lleva el desierto. La memoria, finalmente, queda en manos de personas comunes y corrientes, que son capaces de transmitir en relatos, canciones, obras teatrales, libros y películas, lo que el poder quiere callar y olvidar», reflexiona.

En el marco de los 50 años del golpe de Estado, a juicio del realizador, este trabajo además «suma nuevas voces y, sobre todo, nuevas perspectivas respecto a lo que aconteció en 1973».

Para Beas, en este contexto es vital «traer al presente esos recuerdos que son parte de la historia de un gran número de hombres y mujeres de este país» y contarles a las nuevas generaciones «un pedazo de lo que ocurrió en esos años tan dolorosos y dramáticos para Chile».

«En este sentido, fue muy impactante ver la reacción de asombro y solidaridad con nosotros que manifestaron los alumnos que participaron en el documental. Muchos no sabían nada o poco y eso nos dio más razón para esforzarnos en dar a conocer y recuperar esas memorias. La memoria de esos atropellos nunca debe perderse», recalca.

Especialmente tras el estallido de 2019, para ella la memoria de lo que pasó en esos años oscuros «es el mejor tratamiento para combatir el terrorismo de cualquier Estado en cualquier momento». Y cita al escritor uruguayo Eduardo Galeano, para quien “la memoria es un puerto de partida” que sirve para “pensar el pasado del que todavía hoy estamos hechos”.

«Y este país está hecho con personas que ejercieron un terrorismo de Estado y las víctimas de ello. No hago dos lecturas en eso», concluye.

Ficha técnica:
País: Chile, 2023
Duración: 62 minutos
Producción Ejecutiva: Angélica Beas Millas, Sergio Campos Ulloa
Dirección: Roberto Riveros Jiménez
Equipo Realizador y de Investigación: Scarlett Rost, Magdalena Rubio, Daniel Achurra,
Pía Oliva, Valentina Adones, Laboratorio Audiovisual UCEN 2018.
Guion: Macarena Navarrete Muñoz, Roberto Riveros Jiménez
Producción Periodística: Sergio Campos Ulloa, Angélica Beas Millas, Ignacio Paz Palma.
Montaje: Ramón Alaniz, Roberto Riveros Jiménez.
Producción Música Original: Cristián Cárdenas Velásquez
Postproducción Sonido y Mezcla: Alexander VanLawren, Cristián Cárdenas Velásquez
Distribución: Cintámani Films

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In scrawling cursive, an English enslaver named Robert Norris, captain of the slave ship The Unity, wrote an entry in his log marked June 6, 1770: “The slaves made an Insurrection which was soon quelled…with the loss of two woman slaves.” On June 22, “the slaves attempted another Insurrection after the death of a girl slave.” Then again, four days later on June 26, “a few of the slaves got off their Handcuffs but were detected in Time.” That’s three uprisings on one ship, in less than a month, all involving female African captives. Historian Rebecca Hall, author of the graphic novel Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, says that’s not an anomaly; enslaved women and female captives led numerous uprisings, such as those onboard The Unity.

In her new book, Hall opens with a “measured use of historical imagination,” working with her illustrator, Hugo Martínez, to visualize how the women on board The Unity fought back in 1770. It wasn’t hard to do, considering that 227 of the African captives on board were sold to Norris in Abomey, the capital of Dahomey, where women were trained as skilled warriors. “There were constant revolts,” says Hall. Atlas Obscura spoke with Hall about why she’s drawn to these women, such as “the Negro Wench” who led a 1708 slave revolt in New York City, and their enduring legacy.

What is it about female warriors that have drawn you to their stories?

Since I was a little kid, I remember watching women who fought back on TV. I watched Charlie's Angels and The Bionic Woman. I've always been drawn to women warriors because I find the idea of women fighting back in that way very inspiring.

I’m interested in women warriors also as a historical category of analysis. I'm fascinated by the ways in which women warriors are valorized and disavowed at the same time. There are women warriors throughout history, but what happens is that the history is erased or the women become some kind of exception: She became this way because her husband died and she had to take over leadership. It’s always tied to a woman’s role. She ends up becoming the exception that proves the rule over and over again that women aren't warriors. In my own research in recovering the women who led slave revolts and participated in slave revolts, there was such pushback because people couldn’t even imagine the concept.

What's the first woman-led slave revolt you uncovered?

A woman led a revolt in what's now Queens [in New York City]. It was in the city of Newtown, which is [now] Elmhurst. She led a revolt and she was captured. She was burned at the stake and the men who were involved in the revolt were hanged. And I would love to tell you her name, but it's not preserved. She was referred to as the “Negro Fiend,” so that's what I call her.

How do we know a woman led this revolt in 1708?

There was one newspaper in the British colonies. It was The Boston Weekly Newsletter. So there are a couple of articles that describe what happened and talk about her. There's a correspondence between Lord Cornbury, who was then governor of New York [and New Jersey], to the Privy Council in England describing the events. [There was also a 19th-century book, written by a self-styled historian, called The Annals of Newtown.] It describes this revolt and the family that was killed: a man, his wife who was pregnant, and five kids. So those are all the sources related to that incident, and they all refer to this woman—the “Negro Wench” or the “Negro Fiend.”

Your book opens with a female-led revolt on a slave ship. How did you learn about women’s involvement in ship insurrections?

There's this incredible database. It's called the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a searchable database of over 36,000 slave ship voyages. Historians using it found that there was [about one revolt for every ten voyages], which is much higher than anyone expected, because it's basically suicide. Then they were like, “Okay, so what's the difference between ships that have revolts and ships that didn't have revolts?” The only statistical difference was the more women on the ship, the more likely a revolt. And then they just dismissed their own findings by saying, “But we all know that women weren't involved in this kind of militant fighting.”

What might explain why more women on a ship made a revolt more likely?

[The slave trade] was a highly regulated business. So the rule was when you're on the coast of West Africa and you're loading captives onto your ship, everyone was kept below deck and in chains, because there was a risk of what's called a “cut-off,” where men and women would come and attack the ship and try to free the people on board. So to avoid that, [enslavers] kept everybody chained below deck. But once the ship was in the Atlantic, they took all the women, unchained them, and put them on deck, which is where the weapons were. It was about sexual violence and control, but it was also dismissing women as potential danger sources. A lot of these slavers died because they didn't take [these women] seriously.

Why are there such detailed records of slave ship insurrections like those on board The Unity in 1770?

The reason why these revolts were documented was for insurance purposes. So Lloyd's of London or [another insurance company] would insure slave traders and their ships and their so-called cargo. One of the things they would insure them against was something called the insurrection of cargo—which is crazy if you think about it because how can cargo insurrect? So [enslavers] needed to document every revolt, and that's why there are such good records on it.

What's the most important thing readers should know about female-led slave revolts?

Slave revolts, generally speaking, are so important and underappreciated in the Atlantic world [and] British-American history. So, first of all, I would like people to know that there were slave revolts. There were constant revolts. And that these revolts put so much pressure on—and helped to bring about the end of—the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself. I want people to know that we've been fighting this whole time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Durante su juventud en Colonia Dignidad, el excolono Peter Rahl fue tratado tan a menudo con descargas de electroshock y psicofármacos que tiene enormes lagunas de memoria. “Yo ya no sabía nada. No sabía ni cómo me llamaba, ni si alguna vez había tenido nombre. No sabía si se dirigían a mí cuando me hablaban. No sabía en qué año estaba, ni tampoco qué eran los años, o las estaciones. Ni lo que eran Chile y Alemania”, cuenta en el documental Los sobrevivientes, de Rosario Cervio. Como él, otros muchos niños alemanes pasaron por la llamada Neukra, un macabro experimento clínico decididamente nazi.

Varios de los niños abusados por Paul Schäfer, recuerdan poco de aquellas noches espeluznantes. En declaraciones judiciales aseguran que los tíos los obligaban a tomar un “jugo picante”, seguramente un “sedante de efecto hipnótico, ansiolítico y relajante muscular”, como apuntan algunos médicos que los examinaron. “El Tío Permanente [Schäfer] nos bañaba en su casa. Nos daba un vasito de jugo y nos despertábamos en distintas partes, no nos dábamos cuenta. Yo desperté en la cama de él algunas veces”, se puede leer en el testimonio del entonces niño Jaime Parra.

También las niñas y niños chilenos que asistían al siniestro “campamento vacacional” de la Juventud Vigilia Permanente, debían tomar el jugo después de pasar unos días en el enclave alemán. De esa manera olvidaban contar cómo les pegaban o cómo les hacían trabajar extensas jornadas en el campo, en los gallineros, ordeñando a las vacas o sirviendo a los jerarcas.

La lista de crímenes de Schäfer y su pandilla es extensa: violación a los derechos humanos, pedofilia, tortura, esclavismo, tráfico de armas, adopciones ilegales, secuestros, desaparición de personas en colaboración con la dictadura, entrenamiento de grupos paramilitares… A ella debería sumarse otro más: la amnesia forzosa. Además de todo lo que padecieron, estas víctimas fueron sometidas al extravío, a la pérdida.

Lo vergonzoso es que luego fueron condenadas a un olvido más: el abandono, la desatención y la indiferencia de todo un país (dos países en realidad: Chile y Alemania).

La existencia, aún hoy, de Colonia Dignidad, no es solo un fracaso de la política de memoria de Chile, sino también un fracaso político en general, un gran fracaso de la justicia, un triunfo indecente de la impunidad. “Cuando el testigo del abuso y la violencia mira hacia otro lado, cuando prefiere no ver ni saber, cuando una vez pasada la violencia exige el olvido, y cuando este testigo representa a una mayoría, nos encontramos ante una sociedad enferma”, señala la escritora Edurne Portela.

Por décadas, estas víctimas de la locura sociópata que instaló Schäfer en connivencia con militares, empresarios y políticos, han hecho un enorme esfuerzo por recordar, por encajar las piezas sueltas y recuperar los pedazos de esa memoria escurridiza que les arrebataron.

Seguramente para ellos no es agradable recordar. Tal vez preferirían quedarse en el olvido, pasar la página, evitar la exposición. “Me acuerdo que me hizo algo malo, pero no me gusta acordarme”, declaró otro de los niños abusados.

Pero, si hacen ese ejercicio doloroso es porque lo necesitan. Necesitan reconstruirse, restituir su identidad, comprender lo que sucedió, nombrarlo. Ojalá obtener justicia y reparación. En la tortuosa lentitud de los procedimientos judiciales, hay muchas que ya no pueden, porque ya han muerto.

A diferencia de todas estas víctimas y su esfuerzo por recordar, el señor Hernán Larraín Fernández, hoy flamante experto constitucional, no se acuerda.

Prefiere olvidar.

Le conviene olvidar.

“Para serle franco, no lo recuerdo”, contestó el exministro de Justicia y Derechos Humanos cuando le preguntaron acerca de sus discursos a favor de la Colonia y en contra de los allanamientos policiales a Dignidad.

¿Qué recuerda entonces Hernán Larraín de sus visitas a la Colonia en los años setenta durante la dictadura, y de las que hizo como senador en los noventa, ya en democracia? ¿Nunca tuvo curiosidad, en su paso por allí el año 74 y el 75, por averiguar lo que sucedía en la Bodega de Papas, junto a la gasolinera, con agentes de la DINA entrando y saliendo?

¿Cómo no notar en alguna de sus excursiones que algo andaba mal, o al menos que las cosas dentro del enclave eran raras? ¿No despertaron en él ninguna sospecha las cercas electrificadas, las casetas de vigilancia, los hombres y mujeres que se desplazaban como zombis, y que claramente tenían prohibido salir al mundo exterior?

¿En serio su impresión, como dijo después de la fuga de Tobias Müller y Salo Luna, era que todos estaban allí voluntariamente?

¿No se dio cuenta de que los hijos eran separados de sus padres, de que había niños chilenos adoptados ilegalmente, de que las parejas no podían casarse, tan defensor de la familia como es? ¿Nunca reparó en el trato humillante que les daban a las mujeres, consideradas seres inferiores, incluso peor que las gallinas porque ni siquiera ponen huevos?

¿Siendo abogado, no levantaron en él una leve suspicacia las transferencias ilegales de dinero, el desfile de testaferros?

¿Cómo no mostrar, tras décadas de denuncias, un atisbo de duda, algún resquemor siquiera?

Hay numerosos videos y pruebas de sus visitas y de sus arengas en favor de la Colonia y de Schäfer, así que no puede negar que se paseó entre esos colonos-esclavos, que se sentó a la mesa con los jerarcas. Tampoco puede borrar que en 1991 se opusiera, junto a otros senadores UDI y RN, a que se eliminara la personalidad jurídica de la Colonia. O que lamentara amargamente el cierre del nefasto hospital de la Colonia. O su derroche de adjetivos en el Senado (“una gigantesca obra de bien social”). Ahora asegura que a partir de 1997 nunca más se relacionó con los alemanes. Es decir, cuando ya habían pasado más de 30 años desde la fuga de Wolfgang Kneese, el primer colono en lograr escapar y denunciar. Cuando estaban demostradas las violaciones a los derechos humanos o los casos de abusos sexuales. Cuando hacía mucho que cualquiera sabía.

Pero él prefiere olvidar.

El primer presidente (provisional) de la comisión experta que esta semana comienza a redactar el anteproyecto constitucional, no recuerda.

Ni quiere.

 

Meriance is still seeking justice nine years after she was freed from an employer she says abused her.