Chilean politics is going through a moment of profound change. After decades of neoliberal predominance carried out by the former “Centre “coalition negotiating with the right, the country has experienced a growing social and political polarization. The social explosion in 2019 illustrated the exhaustion of the accumulation of model inherited from the military dictatorship, while the subsequent constitutional processes reflected the difficulties of the different political forces to build a new pact of “legitimacy”. In this context, the rise of the most conservative right and the government headed by a Pinochet supporter such as José Kast, represents a scenario that deserves to be analysed from a class perspective, understanding that political transformations cannot be understood only from the ideological clashes, but as an expression of the material contradictions of Chilean capitalism.
Marxist materialist theory teaches us that the state is not a neutral arbiter between conflicting interests, but a specific form of organization of political power that guarantees the reproduction of the social relations of production. Therefore, the arrival of José Kast to the government does not simply mean a change of administration. It is the political expression of the interests of the ruling class that seeks to establish the conditions of capital accumulation in the face of an economic slowdown, international uncertainty and growing social conflict.
Chilean capitalism today faces structural tensions. For decades, economic growth rested on the export of raw materials, trade liberalization, the financial drift of the economy and the conversion of social rights such as education, health, pensions and housing into just other commodities. This model allowed significant growth rates during certain periods, but it also produced high levels of inequality, concentration of wealth at the top and job insecurity. The expansion of credit made it possible to artificially sustain the consumption of large sectors of the population, while indebtedness progressively replaced increases in wages as a mechanism of social reproduction.
However, the conditions that made this growth cycle possible show obvious signs of exhaustion. The slowdown in the world economy, the lower demand for raw materials, the transformation of global chains of production and growing geopolitical competition reduce the room for manoeuvre of dependent economies such as Chile. These difficulties do not correspond to conjunctural errors of management, but to contradictions inherent in the system of capitalist accumulation itself.
In this scenario, various proposals promoted by the political sectors represented by Kast can be interpreted as an attempt to restore the conditions of profitability of capital through a deepening of market policies. These include the reduction of public spending, the revision of social programs considered excessive or inefficient, the reduction of the tax burden on companies, the strengthening of private investment as the main engine of growth and various initiatives aimed at making the labour market more flexible.
These proposals respond to a well-known logic: when profitability is in difficulty, capital seeks to restore its rates of profit by reducing labour costs, reducing taxes, privatizing spaces previously managed by the State, and weakening the bargaining power of the labour force.
The current discussion on labour laws is especially significant. Proposals for flexibility are usually presented as mechanisms aimed at increasing competitiveness, reducing unemployment or facilitating hiring. However, these reforms modify the correlation of forces between capital and labour. Easier dismissal of workers, broadening individual bargaining over collective bargaining, making working hours more flexible or reducing regulations can increase the employer’s capacity to extract more profits, while weakening union organization and reducing workers’ bargaining power.
This is not just a legal problem. Labor relations constitute one of the main scenarios where the class struggle is expressed. Each regulatory change alters the balance between those who sell their labour power and those who control the means of production. For this reason, labour reforms cannot be analysed only from indicators of productivity or economic growth, but also from their effects on the distribution of power within the production process.
Something similar happens with the policy of social cuts. From a liberal perspective, the reduction of public spending is usually justified by arguments of fiscal efficiency, budgetary balance or economic responsibility. However, it is necessary to understand that social spending is also a form of reproduction of the labour force. Public education, health, pensions, subsidies and various social policies make it possible to sustain the material conditions necessary for the daily reproduction of the working population.
Reducing these mechanisms implies transferring these costs back to families, increasing the commodification of basic needs. In other words, activities previously partially covered by the State are once again transformed into markets where the ability to pay and private profitability predominate. This process deepens existing inequalities and strengthens the accumulation of capital in sectors that provide these services.
However, limiting the analysis only to the economic consequences would be insufficient. Any recomposition of the accumulation model also requires a recomposition of political hegemony. In this sense, the arguments about law and order and public safety, the fight against crime and the strengthening of police powers occupy a central place within the political project of the ultra-right.
The Italian revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci, argued “hegemony combines consensus and coercion. When material conditions generate growing social conflicts, the state tends to simultaneously reinforce the ideological mechanisms that legitimize the existing order and the repressive capacities aimed at containing social protest. Security then ceases to be only a public policy and also becomes an instrument for stabilizing the economic model.”
Ultra right
Drug trafficking and organized crime, together with common crime, are phenomena that have been increasing over the years in Chile.
The ultra-right takes advantage of these social conflicts to promote new policies of repression that are apparently on the way to combating crime, but which nevertheless ultimately end up being politically articulated to legitimize the repression of social protest.
There is no doubt that all the security laws that are intended to be promoted and approved in Congress are aimed at preparing the state apparatus for a possible new social explosion because of the entire policy of cuts and attacks on the social rights of the working class.
Another relevant element corresponds to the relationship between national capital and transnational capital. Chile continues to occupy a dependent position within the world economy, characterized by the export of natural resources and a significant presence of foreign investment. This government, oriented towards economic deregulation, probably seeks to consolidate this international insertion through greater incentives for private investment and fewer regulatory restrictions.
With the international situation existing today in the world, increasing Chile’s dependence on international investment will only deepen the precariousness in which the Chilean working class lives, many of the investments that are made do not bring with them a great demand for labour, therefore, they do not create a large number of jobs. The expansion of investments can generate economic growth in certain sectors, but they are precarious jobs with low wages and do not necessarily modify the productive structure or reduce the technological, financial and industrial dependence that characterizes peripheral economies such as Chile’s.
Faced with this scenario, it is also worth asking about the possibilities of response of popular organizations. The Chilean trade union movement faces significant levels of fragmentation, low rates of unionization in many sectors, and an institutional framework built during the dictatorship that has limited collective bargaining. Added to this is the growing heterogeneity of the world of work, where informal employment, digital platforms and various forms of subcontracting are increasing.
At the same time, capital itself faces objective limits. A strategy based exclusively on the reduction of labour rights and social spending can generate temporary improvements in business profitability, but it also deepens social tensions, reduces domestic demand and increases levels of political conflict. In this sense, austerity policies contain an inherent contradiction: they seek to stabilize the process of accumulation but weaken the foundations that sustain the “legitimacy of the system.”
Chile’s recent history offers multiple examples of these dynamics. For decades, the neoliberal model managed to combine economic growth with relative political stability. However, the persistent increase in inequality, economic concentration and household indebtedness ended up generating a deep social unrest that began in the mid-2000s with student mobilizations and the so-called Penguin Revolution and that found its maximum expression in the social outburst of 2019.
To this day, after the four years of Gabriel Boric’s government with the Broad Front and the Communist Party and the four months of José Kast’s government, the social problems that provoked the social uprising remain exactly the same, and we can even say that they have deepened, so it is very likely that the accumulation of anger will end up bursting through again.
In short, the government of José Kast can be interpreted as a new attempt by the capitalist elite to re-establish a “democratic dictatorship” by deepening the policies of the neo-liberal “Chicago boys”, strengthening public order and the recomposition of state authority. Labour reforms, the reduction of social spending and the emphasis on private investment are not isolated policies, but components of a strategy aimed at strengthening the position of capital vis-à-vis labour in a context of growing economic crises.
History shows that class relations are dynamic and that every offensive of capital generates, to a greater or lesser extent, social, trade union and political responses. The contradictions of Chilean capitalism will hardly disappear through institutional adjustments or market reforms. On the contrary, it is possible that the tensions between economic growth, inequality, democratic legitimacy and social rights will continue to shape the central axis of Chilean politics in the coming years.
As we have said on numerous occasions, the drama of the Chilean and international working class passes through the weakness of the subjective of the objective factor.
The atomization of the social movement, the caudillo interests of the different points of reference of the Chilean left outside the institutions, represent an additional problem in the enormous work of raising a class alternative that can confront in a unitary way the attacks by the capitalists on social and labour rights.
For us Marxists, the situation is clear. The capitalist system is the problem, no solution is possible within the system, reformist policies have proven their bankruptcy.
In short, the policies of the government of José Kast will only deepen the crisis and precariousness of the working class and after a while of not seeing results, we will once again have massive mobilizations in the streets.
For now, even those called to mobilize have little mass power, but this will change in the not-too-distant future.
Our task continues to be to raise a representative organization of the working class with a revolutionary program that is oriented to overthrow the capitalist system and that fights to establish a socialist society.