New Left Review I/172, November-December 1988

James Petras

The New Class Basis of Chilean Politics

In the plebiscite held in Chile in October 1988, the attention of the international press focused overwhelmingly on the exposed position of the ageing head of the dictatorship, Augusto Pinochet. For the new power bloc, however, comprising the armed forces, the capitalist class, bankers and technocrats, the primary concern has been not the plebiscite as such but the need to safeguard the accumulation regime established over the past fifteen years. [1] There is a vast literature on the subject. For a summary discussion of the large-scale, long-term structural changes implanted by the Pinochet regime, see Alejandro Foxley, Latin American Experiments in Neo-Conservative Economics, Berkeley 1983, pp. 40–112, and Sergio Bitar, Chile: Liberalismo económico y dictadura politica, Lima 1980. The Pinochet regime served a number of invaluable historical purposes: destruction of the Popular Unity government and of the socialist movements; consolidation of the military and civilian bureaucracies; integration of Chile into international financial, commercial and agricultural circuits; relocation of political debate on the terrain of private market discourse; and the elimination of most anti-imperialist intellectual currents. In the process of realizing these aims, however, the dictatorship incurred numerous enemies, provoked large-scale, sustained opposition, and eventually became an obstacle to the reproduction and legitimation of the new economic and institutional order. Fifteen years of terror and free market exploitation are not an appropriate basis for winning plebiscites. And the opposition political class, with a critical discourse, is capable of eliciting popular support and subordinating the mass of the population to a political pact with the power bloc—although this bloc itself is demanding stiff terms and setting very narrow margins for mainly legal–political reform.

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