A specter haunts the neoliberal globe: Reworking the communist hypothesis through the Chilean student movement

Two crucial aspects make the Chilean student movement particularly interesting. First, its demands point at the legacies of the Pinochet’s dictatorship. The student are calling into question not only profit in education but also the socioeconomic model inherited from dictatorship and institutionalized due to the political arrangements of the democratic transition. Only after considering these historical events can we fully grasp students’ demands for a new constitution, a participatory democracy, and a tax reform aimed at transforming the neoliberal state.

Second, unlike the Arab revolutionaries, the European indignados or the Wall Street’s occupiers, which publicly reject every past form of institutional politics, have no clear leadership, and resemble anarchist practices; the Chilean movement shows a high influence of old communist politics and revolves around the preaching of notorious leaders. Instead of growing in complete estrangement from traditional organizations, the students combine spontaneous and creative participation with old left-wing politics, highly institutionalized and markedly permeated by Leninist practices and communist rhetoric.

This paper analyzes these two distinctive characteristics. I argue that the links among neoliberalism, military rule and democratization are crucial to understand the significance of the student movement. I state that the students’ demands receive such an important level of support because they aim at removing the legacies of Pinochet’s regime that transition to democracy left untouched. I also stress that the movement may be seen as a new incarnation of the “spectral” communist Idea, and that this communist resurgence has significantly framed the strategic development of the movement. At least in Chile, old vanguard politics (like communism) seem to be helpful for an increasingly autonomous civil society to reject institutional politics and pose universal hypothesis around which alternatives to neoliberal hegemony may be formulated.