Genesis of the event

The first question is about the origin of the uprising: Why did it occur? We know very little about the exact origin of the uprising, which began with decentralized protests by neighbors and, above all, fare evasion on the Santiago subway by high school students. What could have happened in neighborhoods to prompt their inhabitants to mobilize? All neighborhoods, or only some? How did they organize themselves? What role could social networks have played in the student-led mobilizations?Footnote ⁹ Was there some kind of contagion from Santiago to the rest of the country? On the last question, we know practically nothing. The books under review here examine the role of macro-level phenomena and processes in the collective action of the demonstrators.

In Octubre chileno: La irrupción de un nuevo pueblo, Carlos Ruiz asserts that the continuity of neoliberal policies and reforms following the democratic transition in the country shaped a form of state that favored the concentration of capital and the proliferation of socioeconomic inequality. This “concentration under state stimulus” played a role in the “awakening” of those who had never been able to enjoy “opportunities, nor equality.” What happened was “only a state phenomenon of inequality” (68). While Ruiz’s idea is convoluted, what needs to be understood is that the concentration of wealth and inequality in Chile resulted from state policies, not the spontaneous functioning of the market. Contrary to the expectedly paralyzing effects of “the worst of the prisons of consumption, the most degrading intellectual obsolescence at the hands of the stupefying effect of hollow social networks and other current cultural miscreations” (5), Chileans of all social classes rose up against the “model.” The convoluted style of this phrasing muddles the argument: Contrary to the expectation that the consumerism and tattered social fabric of neoliberal Chile would prevent collective political action, Chileans of all social classes rose up against the model. However, even if we accept the role of neoliberal policy in triggering the protests, how could discontent lead to mass—and in some cases, violent—protests, particularly when the individual protesting had never protested before?Footnote ¹⁰ What is the articulation between agency and the structure that triggers it? Moreover, what happens to those who do not protest? How are they exposed to the uprising, and what attitudes do they adopt in the face of the event? Azun Candina Polomer offers us some clues in a chapter of the book Chile despertó in which she argues (without providing any empirical data) that the uprising had its origin in the middle class (53–57).Footnote ¹¹ That may be so. However, like Azun Candina Polomer, Ruiz fails to offer empirical support for his claim that the neoliberal policy model triggered the protests. His argument is mostly confined to a moral critique of neoliberalism. This limitation is apparent in many of the works reviewed here, which are rich in essayistic political criticism but often lack empirical evidence, let alone scientific demonstration.

Since at least 2011, there has been important essayistic reflection on the possible collapse of the Chilean model or the need to move to “another model” through profound reforms.Footnote ¹² This makes it quite logical to associate the uprising with widespread social and intellectual criticism of the model and its pathologies. Similarly, it is plausible to posit a relationship between criticism of the development model and its crisis, in that criticism helped generate the crisis of legitimacy that was expressed in social discontent and demonstrations in demand for profound transformations. This is related particularly to how, thanks to the enshrinement of the principle of subsidiarity in the country’s constitution, public goods, such as education, health, and pensions, reproduce social inequalities due to the participation of the private sector in their provision.Footnote ¹³

This is precisely what Kathya Araujo addresses in her chapter in Hilos tensados. She refers to how the neoliberal model has generated multiple consequences in terms of creating labor precariousness, social inequity, loss of protections, and privatization of social services, which has led people to feel much more pressured by the system to manage their lives (20). She refers to “excessive demands” (20–21) by the neoliberal model as lying at the origin not of the malaise but of a form of collective “irritation” provoked by “the language of abuse and disrespect,” which soon became a “natural expression to designate the intolerable” (27). Based on many in-depth interviews, Araujo argues (in The Circuit of Detachment in Chile) that the uprising can be interpreted as the result of a long “circuit of detachment.” This circuit comprises four subjective stages that can be understood as incremental and cumulative. First is the naturalization of hierarchies, which presupposes deference and acceptance insofar as these hierarchies have always existed—in other words, something similar to traditional domination as understood by Max Weber. Second is the “logic of privilege” disguised by “fake meritocracy,” with all the associated frustrations (especially the loss in value of diplomas, which created discontent among many educated Chileans). In the third stage, the “logic of authoritarianism” involves the imposition of a definition of order on the basis of privilege. Fourth is the “exercise of power,” which leads to access to “goods, prerogatives over their use,” or to the place that “a person occupies in society.” All this implies a “new sensibility,” which is far from being the inevitable result of the articulation of the four subjective stages. Each stage corresponds to a specific attitude that is collected in interviews and focus groups. According to Araujo, what really produces detachment, and therefore the subjective basis for protest, is “the clash between expectations of horizontality and the continuing reality of these logics [that] undermined the promise of equality” (25) during the rule of the center-left Concertación coalition between 1990 and 2010.

Kathya Araujo’s research is very interesting because it takes us from the diffuse state of “malaise” to incremental forms of “irritation” that could logically have served as the subjective basis for the social uprising. Araujo carefully distinguishes between different forms of irritation, ranging from irritation with institutions for not satisfying needs to irritation conceived in terms of “power” that operates as a “source of abuse and humiliation” (35). However, according to Araujo, irritation does not suffice to move on to a form of collective action like the uprising. What is present first is the detachment produced by this subjective circuit, understood as “an irregular and multiform process of estrangement and disengagement from the principles, rationalities, and legitimacies that order the social bond.” To put it another way, “detachment is associated with a loosening of the links that bind us to society” (36). For Araujo, detachment as a social phenomenon also affects politics, because it “indicates that individuals’ relationships with politics have become much less ideologically or organizationally coherent” (48). In Araujo’s view, the attitudinal or subjective circuit is formed by excessiveness, a fact expressed in the frustration that people feel from the overload they endure to aspire to achieve what Bourdieu calls the freedom of choice—that is, by very hard forms of need satisfaction by the individuals themselves, often without state support, to which is added disenchantment, irritation, and detachment. Each of these subjective states brings with it attitudes and behaviors that open up the possibility of moving on to protest.

Araujo’s demonstration is suggestive but too harmonious or logical. It is as if the protest behavior that led to the uprising went through clearly differentiated (and necessary?) attitudinal and psychological stages, without the intervention of mediating factors that permitted passage from one attitudinal stage to another or the skipping of a stage and a direct move to protest. One of these possibly mediating factors is political disaffection or the emotional stress of a life of competing needs. While this idea of mediation is expressed in Araujo’s book—“The combined stress of high social demands and meager institutional support is revealed both in the fierce forms of competition and individual affirmation that cross social life, and in the worldwide increased prevalence of emotional discomfort and mental illness. Symptoms such as political disaffection appear in many societies” (57)—it is not shown how these subjective states served as leverage to move to protest and sometimes violence.

Essentially, the blind spot in essayistic reflection on the attitudinal effects of the neoliberal model and its behavioral expressions (in this case, protest) is that the articulation between the one and the other (what Alexander and coauthors called, in theoretical terms, the “micro-macro link”Footnote ¹⁴ ) is not obvious. True, Araujo’s four stages suggest many clues as to this link, yet largely disregard the macro and meso levels. By contrast, studies referring to the macro level (e.g., “neoliberalism,” the “model”) abound and rarely attempt to clarify the link between the macro, meso, and micro levels or, to put it another way, between structure and agency. This is a very important debate in the social sciences and is not resolved theoretically but empirically on the basis of case studies. Unfortunately, the texts under review make little attempt at illustrating the link between structure and agency. For instance, what of the possibility that individuals with singular life trajectories may have protested not as a result of progression through subjective stages but as a result of biographical leaps in which the uprising itself played an important socializing role, so important that it permitted the “skipping” of vital moments?

Carlos Peña’s book Pensar el malestar: La crisis de octubre y la cuestión constitucional is the best example of an essayistic interpretation that neglects the agency of those who protested but is, at the same time, trapped in the logic of the economic modernization of Chilean society. Peña is unable to say anything about the motives for the protest behavior of thousands of individual Chileans. What he does discuss, without any empirical data, are the effects of rapid capitalist modernization in generating frustrations and “hysteresis” in Chileans, who were socialized under the meritocratic promise of success through effort and felt cheated by the declining value of diplomas and structural restrictions on upward social mobility.Footnote ¹⁵ In Peña’s argument, there is a strong and justified emphasis on the effects of education on feelings of political competence and on the propensity to be interested in causes and participate in collective action.Footnote ¹⁶ This is why Peña sees malaise as “a generational issue” that reflects the existence of a “more educated generation” (50) that, thanks to its credentials, is far more autonomous than previous generations. In these new generations who were protagonists of the social uprising, Peña sees a “demand for community, for social bonds” with its roots in needs unsatisfied by the market that “eroded the social cement” (52). Peña is careful to differentiate his interpretation from the American modernization theory of the 1950s. While this theory (from Rostow to Parsons) asserts that “all societies, as they improve their adaptive capacity, tend to converge in the same type or model of society” (54), Peña emphasizes that “Chile has experienced a marked and rapid change in its material conditions of existence, a broad process of abstraction of its social relations—driven especially by the generalization of the market” (54). As a result, politics has lost centrality, contributing not only to its own impotence to solve problems and meet needs but also to the “individuation or subjectivization of life” (54). In other words, in Peña’s argument, the weakness of institutions plays an important role, as they fail to channel the demands and their responses, thus provoking protests.Footnote ¹⁷

Peña’s argument is relevant because his capitalist modernization approach enables us to understand the attainment of “relative well-being, but [which] accentuates frustration” (59). Does this, then, explain the social uprising? No—nor does it explain inequality, because if inequality were the trigger, “neither Latin America nor Africa nor India would have a single moment of tranquility” (85). Thus stated, the explanation is highly problematic: Contextual elements and aspects of economic history are backed by satisfactory welfare figures (decline in poverty, slow decline in the Gini index, increase in gross domestic product in all its facets), but they have no correlation in the perception of inequality. How can this be explained? Peña’s essay does not address the empirical articulation between macro-level data and the micro-level effects on individual agency and completely overlooks the meso level. It is too easy to explain the genesis of the social uprising only in terms of general contextual elements without observing or understanding the connection between macro-level indicators and micro-level protest behaviors. In this sense, the great problem of an essayistic approach is the excessively aggregated level of analysis, which does not consider the conditions that explain the step from what the macro-level indicators tell us to micro-level protest behavior (or, by the same token, the inexplicable character of behavior that is refractory to protest).

The mobilizing and socializing effect of the social uprising

It is no accident that experts who study social movements were the first to take an interest in the Chilean uprising. These researchers, generally sociologists, use empirical resources, especially focus groups and interviews. An excellent example is Karla Henríquez, who, in an interesting chapter of the book Chile en movimientos, examines the role of social movements and collective actions on people. She describes them as “a source of accelerated socialization” (185). This is consistent with research in other countries insofar as “in the social revolt, people from different classes and social realities met,” affecting even those who merely witnessed the event (the “spectators”) (187, 189).Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, in the social uprising (as well as major historical events in other countriesFootnote ¹⁹ ), many people changed their minds about what they perceived and experienced. Through becoming familiar with critical positions, they came to see their reality as more problematic and accepted the demand for dignity as their own. This cognitive socialization is very important because it refers to what the Chileans who supported the social uprising (there were manyFootnote ²⁰ ) experienced in the form of attitudinal changes that, once the uprising was over, prompted “a phase of reflexive withdrawal in which they process the experiences lived through” (188). Not many studies have taken the time to analyze specific individuals in the real time of the events, but we know these produced effects.Footnote ²¹ The question is whether the effects, in the form of something like awareness or “awakening” about the reasons that led to the social uprising, will be lasting in personal biographies. Naturally, the question remains open.

Complementing the above, the chapter by Geoffrey Pleyers looks at the characteristics of twenty-first-century social movements that could be observed in the Chilean social uprising. Pleyers stresses the importance of the forms of organization, marked by national ideas spread through socio-digital networks, and how activism is associated with strong subjectivism and is not necessarily related to experiences of formal organization (63). Of particular note is his conclusion about how this process has an impact of “profound transformation of what it means to be Chilean in the twenty-first century” (70).

The essayistic literature does not lack excellent intuitions on the matter. In Octubre chileno, Carlos Ruiz suggestively argues, “It is the street, and not the factory or the office, which has long been allowing the multitude to recognize itself as a majority” (47). The question is how people moved to the street from the factory or the office, or without passing through these two spaces. This, in turn, raises the empirical question about the rapid socialization processes that took place in different social sites. Unfortunately, there is no empirical research but many speculations: for example, about the socializing role that may have been played by “meeting points, the call to march, the arranged schedules” where “everything is structured through social networks” (on this point, see the chapter by Danilo Martucelli in Hilos tensados, 395, and Geoffrey Pleyers in Chile en movimientos, 55). There is no doubt that social networks played an essential coordinating role. Nonetheless, can we really assert that social networks are an immaterial space of mobilization and socialization that can dispense with concrete and practical spaces (what the literature on resource mobilization refers to as “social infrastructure”) such as the classroom, groups of friends, or the neighborhood? It does not suffice to note that “at the heart of the events of October 2019 lies hard real life,” a notion that “attempts to account for what tends to be common at the level of many social experiences” (Martucelli in Hilos tensados, 420). In what social sites? How is the experience of hard real life materialized? What are the paths from it to protest?Footnote ²² Martucelli, as well as Kathya Araujo, tells us about the role that may have been played by the “common feeling of suffocation” (Araujo in Hilos tensados, 425), which generates this feeling of a hard existence. In their view, this shared feeling predisposes people to mobilization but does not mobilize them in itself. However, how and through what mechanisms did this lead to the experience of protesting (often for the first time) and sometimes to violence? Martucelli rightly notes that “what becomes central is what is produced by and within the mobilization itself” (Martucelli in Hilos tensados, 433), which is equivalent to saying that things happen in the mobilization and that they serve as sites of socialization. True, but we do not know much about what these things could consist of. Are they the occasional conversations that took place there, the relationships that may have been formed, or what Durkheim would call the “moral density” of the group that emerged within the demonstrating mass or the different subgroups that made up the mass? We do not know.

Nelly Richard is correct when, in Revuelta social y nueva Constitución, she notes that “the revolt of October 2019 gave course to multiple flows of social rebellion that, without previous political coordination or an articulated program of transformation, developed communitarian energies” (31). This observation is important in emphasizing the revolt’s generation of its own life and the resulting creation of common spaces where social networks and relations were produced. Put in a more political way, Richard asserts that “what would be born in the fervor of the street” is a space that is “the irreducible guarantor of the rebellious spontaneity of an outraged population” (42), which means that the street and the activity that takes place there are the fundamental space of protest mobilization and socialization. Richard’s argument may be somewhat tautological in that it characterizes mobilization as producing mobilization without answering the question of what led ordinary people to mobilize and enter a space of socialization whose effects—we assume—may go far beyond the motives and emotions that triggered personal involvement in the first place. Richard’s is fundamentally a political reflection on what underlies what Raúl Zarzuri called (in his chapter in the book 18-O: Una radiografía desde la Academia) a “wave of anger in movement” (17). Its expression forces us to reflect on the type of people involved, whose spontaneity is highlighted by Tomás Moulian in the same book (39–40). This also becomes relevant for assessing Richard’s proposal for the process of drawing up a new constitution after the uprising: through evaluating, deliberating, and fighting in the name of the people.

A new people?

Such was the magnitude of the protests and their capacity to signify objects and things (from walls to monuments) that it is not surprising that, in this selection of books, different definitions of those who were protesting are put forward. In his book Octubre chileno, Carlos Ruiz had no doubt in seeing the social uprising as “a process of constitution of a new people” based on “social practices of action and organization,” which position as adversary “that caste” which has its origin in “the concentration of wealth and opportunities of the neoliberal carousing” (26). He sees in this new emerging people Chileans who “are depositaries of the affection and admiration of the immense majority of society” (5) without providing any proof of the existence of this supposed majority. For Ruiz, its emergence is the result of “dynamic processes of formation of new social identities” that prefigure “a new time,” a “time of prelude” (46, 59). We assume that the formation of new identities originated in states of the world prior to the uprising and that the latter accelerated this process of formation. Unfortunately, we do not know concretely how different social identities (from the identity of sexual minorities to the identity of popular classes and the popularization of the identity of the Mapuche people) form, consolidate, and expand. Ruiz is not wrong in pointing out that “this people is not asking to be represented” but is “demanding participation and to be a determining actor in the formulation of its own future” (62). In the identification of this demand to participate, is there no blind spot regarding who issues the demand, who interprets it, and who satisfies it? Do we really know what this new people wanted, demanded, and desired?

Can we really interpret the will of a “multitude,” so often evoked by Rodrigo Karmy and, in the selection of books reviewed here, Nelly Richard, based on a rereading of Negri and Agamben?Footnote ²³ Richard refers to this “crowd” or “multitude” as the “popular Chile” (18) and its action—the “destituent fury of the street” (42)—whose function is not to create reality but to overcome an institutional reality that resists change. In this sense, reform and the conduct that accompanies it, reformism, are neither possible nor acceptable in Richard’s eyes. Reform is equivalent to endorsing the premises and assumptions of the Chilean model because it would imply introducing modifications within the model in circumstances in which the aim is to replace it—hence the appeal to the logic of the destitution of order.

In this dimension of the social uprising, the social status of the demonstrator, or rather the collective agent who is protesting, is not clear. The question of what moves individuals is logically absent because what matters is the nature of the collective agent, whose existence is beyond doubt, whatever the name used (“people,” “mass,” “street,” “crowd,” or “multitude”). A collective agent, precisely because it is collective, can express itself without the mediation of spokespersons and, instead, does so in town meetings and assemblies that pose a threat to the representative dimension of democracy.Footnote ²⁴ Whatever its form, what stands out in the social uprising is what Nibaldo Cáceres, in his chapter in 18-0: Una radiografía desde la academia, refers to as a “popular rebellion” led by the “underclass” (bajo pueblo) (26), a return to the terminology of Gabriel Salazar.Footnote ²⁵ We do not know how this underclass, multitude, or crowd was able to undertake collective actions in support of different causes, not only disproving the Olsonian paradox of the free rider but also dispensing with mediating forces that were well known and recognized in the functioning of democracy, starting with the political parties.Footnote ²⁶

It is this people, referred to in different ways, that permitted different general interpretations of the social uprising, a phenomenon that we can agree is difficult to comprehend, let alone explain. All that remains is to interpret it.

Overinterpretation of the social uprising

All that has been said so far inevitably gives rise to general interpretations of the social uprising. The phenomenon is sufficiently complex to rule out crude and simplistic interpretations such as that of Lucy Oporto, popular with the right-wing Chilean press. The title of her pamphlet says it all: Lumpenconsumismo, saqueadores y escorias varias: Tener, poseer, destruir (Lumpen-consumerism, looters and various scum: To have, to possess, to destroy). Footnote ²⁷ Oporto depicts a nefarious lumpen-people who, rather than protesting, loot to consume the proceeds. Conversely, in several of the books reviewed here, there is an overinterpretation of the social uprising in virtuous terms. Was it as “luminous” as suggested by José Bengoa in his chapter of 18-O: Una radiografía desde la academia (106)? This overinterpretation is anchored in various aspects of the protest phenomenon, from its orientation (its telos, if you will) to the meaning of the uprising. Martucelli is not mistaken when, in his chapter of Hilos tensados, he notes the “heterogeneous set of processes and situations” that were at the uprising’s origin and played a role in its development. He emphasizes that “the events that took place do not make a system among themselves” (372). This is right, which is equivalent to saying that it is neither logical nor reasonable to assume homogeneity of interests, let alone a project, in the uprising. Instead, it involved “a veritable festival of representations.” The magnitude of the event was such that “the mobilizations thus became a surprising epistemological phenomenon: they had the capacity to demonstrate all the interpretations at the same time” (373). This assertion is important in showing that an essayistic approach offers not proof but rather some principle of plausibility about what is being interpreted. If every interpretation is possible and acceptable, then the social uprising is incomprehensible.

One of the many (over)interpretations is that of Nelly Richard. In Revuelta social y nueva Constitución, she is interested in “the figure of evasion as a trigger for the revolt” (30). There is no doubt that fare evasion on the Santiago subway acted as a trigger, but it does not constitute an explanation. Furthermore, Richard takes the “anarchizing” nature of the revolt seriously as unleashing “communitarian energies” (31), which translated into the ephemeral short-lived domination of the collective in the form of “direct participation, ‘evading’ any mediation, representation, or political-institutional delegation” (32). However, what was central was the act of evading, which Richard addresses metaphorically, that is, as a form of destitution of order in the sense that “the revolt projects a spectral shadow that will continue to attack any normativity that seeks to forcibly tranquilize the social body” (35). In this sense, the agreement reached by political parties on November 15, 2019, was seen as a forced act of tranquility, of pax politica, that violated the spontaneous (and, therefore, genuine) meaning that emerged from the social uprising. This may be the case, but Richard’s argument does not explain why the convention elected, after the uprising, in the first constituent episode had an antiparty and ultraleft orientation and met with resounding failure in a plebiscite on September 4, 2022 (only 38 percent of Chileans supported the proposed new Constitution, which the right did not hesitate to qualify as “octubrista” and associate with the social uprising). True, Nelly Richard had no way of foreseeing the future, but praise for spontaneity (which, in the election of the convention’s members in May 2021, was reflected in the fact that independent persons were allowed to form lists of candidates as if they were parties) resulted in a massive rejection, negating the virtuosity of the social movements and the redemptive function of the social uprising. Insofar as there is no explanation for such a failure (the intellectuals who passionately supported the uprising also evaded questions about the erroneousness of their beliefs regarding what finally happened), it only remains to note the overinterpretation of the event that Nelly Richard was able to offer.Footnote ²⁸

Richard is not alone. In an intuitively interesting way, Mauricio Folchi asserted (in Chile despertó) that the social uprising was “a way of settling accounts with history” (9–10); what the uprising expressed was “the crisis of neoliberalism” and its political expression in “restricted, tutelary democracy” (according to Sergio Grez in his chapter, 13). This judgment is impressive because it resonates with the enormous literature that, as with the 2007–2008 financial crisis and its global effects, sees not only the debacle of neoliberalism but also the end of capitalism.Footnote ²⁹ It is doubtful whether Sergio Grez had even read Wolfgang Streeck and all the literature critical of neoliberalism.Footnote ³⁰ However, this was not an obstacle to a chauvinistic and politically mistaken thesis affirming that Chile will be the tomb of neoliberalism.

All this is part of the collective exercise of overinterpretation in which many Chilean public intellectuals indulged without realizing the political and intellectual implications of their assertions. This is what is surprising. So many things were said categorically and grandiloquently without real empirical investigation. Was it the result of what Pablo Artaza related to “a deep and generalized disaffection” (78)? Maybe, but causally relating disaffection to the uprising calls for a mobilization of methodological resources that is beyond an essayistic approach.

In many ways, the social uprising was a profoundly enigmatic phenomenon. We know ever more about it. However, some aspects remain shrouded in mystery. For instance, we know nothing about the burning of dozens of subway stations: Not even the police evidence helps us decipher what happened there and how it could have happened. The essayistic literature that is the focus of this literature review is completely blind to the reasons for this mass arson attack. Rather, it reflects on structural aspects and, in some cases, is based on ideals about potential factors or dimensions that conditioned collective behavior from the outbreak of the uprising. Despite this blind spot in the research on this important specific point, essayistic work on the social uprising provides us with many intuitions but few proofs. From a scientific perspective, this is a problem.

Every essay, precisely because it is an essay, is a prisoner of its own arguments and limitations. In Pensar el malestar, Peña graciously acknowledges the “hasty” nature of his essay (6). He is an example of the many intellectuals who seek to capture and interpret reality. These interpretations are rarely successful. Unlike with Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, an extraordinary text that connected with the spirit or Zeitgeist of an epoch, nothing remotely similar happened with Chile’s volcanic uprising. Only a sociology of the intellectuals and their interventions could explain why. The questions that the Chilean social uprising of 2019 raised are only the prolegomena.