Preface 

Below are two excerpts from Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited, a compilation of essays and reflections composed during the initial months of the 2019 Chilean uprising, which recently appeared in English. 

In October 2019, Transantiago, the Metropolitan Transit system in Chile’s capital, raised the train fare by thirty pesos. In response, high school students planned what they called a Evasión Masiva, a week of coordinated protests across the city where participants and commuters alike jumped metro turnstiles and refused to pay the fare. On Friday, October 18, a “mass evasion”  shut down Santiago’s metropolitan transit system during rush hour. Crowds began gathering across the city, and by nightfall, barricades guarded by singing revelers burned at every major intersection. Banks and government buildings were set ablaze, while supermarkets, WalMarts, and one sixth of all corporate owned pharmacies were looted. The country’s President at the time, Sebastián Piñera, held a press conference in which he declared a “state of emergency” in the city. Twenty-four hours later, tanks and Humvees patrolled Santiago, military curfews were enforced, and civil liberties were suspended for the first time since the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

This inaugural wave of unrest was quickly countered by a series of political maneuvers that sought to channel the energy in the streets into institutional changes. By November 2019, the ruling conservative party and its opposition agreed to initiating a process that would lead to the drafting of a new constitution. 

Two years have since passed. The constitutional convention has begun to draft a new constitution, and Gabriel Boric, a leader from the 2011 university student movement turned congressional representative, now serves as Chile’s president. In the eyes of many who cleave to the normative framework of political conflict, this trajectory appears as a sorely needed process of social change. However, as Karmy’s meditations on the experiences and rhythms of October 2019 reveal, the most powerful elements of the revolt are often those least capable of being translated into institutional transformations.  

For Karmy, the date “October 18th” marks not simply a night of insurrection, but a fissure that split Chilean history open, like a short circuit that bridged the anger against the Pinochet Dictatorship, the 1990’s transition to democracy, and the present forms of technocratic governance. After decades of violent social control, forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial murder, the political reconciliation that announced the shift from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy was made possible by a series of agreements and accords between Pinochet’s administration, its political supporters, and its centrist and leftist opponents. This meant that throughout the 1990s, Pinochet remained a “senator for life” and the head of the Chilean military, while his 1981 constitution enshrining the Chicago boy’s neoliberal principles remained in place.

Although social democrats and progressives like to present the rampant inequalities and political restrictions that plague contemporary Chile as institutional hangovers from the dictatorship, the Chilean left has its own part to play in this history. As Karmy shows, their inability to break away from “the transitional episteme” has committed them to a pragmatic framework of political conflict, which prioritizes the restoration of a shared legitimacy and the practical matter of governability over all expressions of “popular,” i.e., everyday people’s concern for justice, dignity, and self-respect. If the revolt taught us anything, it’s that the real conflict is not between the camps of left and the right, but between an elitist framework for resolving questions of governance, and a Chilean people who no longer wish to be governed as a population whatsoever.

Whether or not the energy from October 2019 will succeed in breaking out of this transitional episteme remains to be seen. What limitations would need to be overcome, in order for this to happen? In Chile’s capital, it was the state of exception and the military in the streets that allowed the game of mass evasion to be transformed into a general revolt. Yet constitutional states of exception have been declared many times in Chile’s periphery in recent years, without the corresponding eruption of mass revolt. Mapuche communities in Southern Chile have been occupied by the Chilean military since September 2021, in response to an escalation in direct actions against the local elite complicit with extractive industries and ecological destruction earlier that year. In the desert regions along Chile’s northern border, the military has also been called on to police the crisis of mass undocumented immigration spurred by Venezuelans fleeing the economic crisis. This suggests, first, that our understanding of popular revolt must expand beyond the spectacle of urban riots and street demonstrations, to consider what revolt looks like in other territories. At the same time, the concept of “popular” revolt has often been hamstrung by its association with an idea of “the people” as the agent and actor of struggle, whether this be the Nation or various abstract “communities.” As Karmy shows, the protagonists of the Chilean revolt, at the moment they take to the streets, cannot be neatly subsumed under any such categories. In this way, his work not only allows us to see the limitations of the 2019-2021 wave of global uprisings, but also helps us identify potential connections with others struggles internationally that continue to confront similar obstacles. 

—Emilio Janequeo, Santiago de Chile, April 2022

October 18 [1]

Whatever happened to this date? Is it just a chronological date? Perhaps, a dislocated number that, while locating itself on a calendar, desperately flees from it. Its potency does not match its figure, its life with its letter. It explodes without referring to any leader, nor to any political party or partisan vanguard. Everything is much more precarious, but at the same time, more resistant, it can flee between the interstices of the city and permanently “evade” the “who” created by police dynamics. “Evade” designated the subtraction of the sensible life of bodies — what we will call “surface” — with respect to the governmental machinery of neoliberal reason.

As if a crack opened in the middle of the road, as if a historical continuum had stopped. The atmosphere normalized the presence of multiple sounds: sirens breaking the city buzz, helicopters machine-gunning the airspace, shots from various weapons filtering through diverse populations, never before images being monitored by images already frozen, songs — Víctor Jara ^[2] or Jorge González ^[3] — penetrating from other times to face a voracious repression; pots and pans biting into the night coming from dark windows and protesters defying the curfew with shouts and hand-to-hand combat against police or military uniforms.

Nights and days were not the same, but they were the same. A single day, hour or minute that condensed days and nights, days and nights as if there was no more difference between them. Other faces ravaged the mornings, other voices dictated the rhythm; the poor, the blind, those who had said “enough” to a life that promised nothing but debts, to an existence that had renounced all historicity, to an agony whose grief paralyzed bodies. The streets were invested with graffiti with which the crowd embraced the moment of their celebration. It all meant that the downward gaze in front of the boss could not carry on. The randomness of the clash was violent: the boss found the servant in the ferocity of a revolt, without the domestication he presupposed, without the ignorance he attributed to him, without the fear that he had instilled in him.

“No fear” is infinitely replicated on the walls of Chile. With no fear, but with rage: a whole generation that had been hardened by the silence of dictatorship imploded in the emergence of rage brought by their children. But anger not as a psychologically manageable emotion, but as a politically ungovernable affect. The entire transitional episteme was made for docile bodies. It was always a matter of modesty, of control, of learning not to demand beyond “what is possible” within a historical and political limit that became ontological. If not, the military could return or the businessmen could flee: fear provided the affective tonality to the transitional episteme. Sociologists, economists and politicians consolidated an upper echelons’ agreement around the prevalence of neoliberal reason. Everyone had to give in because everyone had to accept the established limit that was forged in the formula “as far as possible”. 

Those who raged during the dictatorship could faint in the desolation of democracy, those who fought during the dictatorship had to tame their spirits in the new transitional machinery. But injustice remained unredeemed. And it is that fissure that always challenged the transitional episteme that is actualized in the politicization of anger that ends up leading the Chilean government machine to bankruptcy.

Rage has been the ardor of an injustice that went beyond the psychological sphere captured by neoliberal confiscation and, like a blast crossing two eras at once, it left historicity in the hands of children: “He who doesn’t know about children, knows nothing of riots.” A revolt leads a people to experience its in-fancy, precisely, the inactuality with oneself, the strange thunder of its untimeliness. Usual spaces and times are shattered into a thousand pieces. And the revolt reminded us that the most decisive tremor, the adjustment with our historicity, is nothing more than a future that is inherited.

It is not a question of “future” as a horizon that owns a precise direction, but of a future in the sense of a disposition to the possibility of becoming others, in which a potency never rested on some trauma that could foreshadow it in some way, but always remained irreducible to the tricks of the law. It is a power that is nothing more than future and that only its clandestine transfer of the impersonality of a common can make it possible for bodies to know what it is that they are actually capable of. Because this potency is defined by its transmissibility and it becomes nothing more than an affirmation of life that escapes any suture provided by power. The future is inherited precisely because the bodies were able to “evade” the fear inoculated by the oligarchy during their years of dictatorship and in the convoluted transition.

The gaze of the former servant — like that passive “Indian” before the colonist — does not bow his head in front of power, but rather defies it and suffers the direct destruction of its eyes. The servant burns everything, launching himself in his martyrological potency for yesterday’s dead, for those who were defeated in the past. Rage burns everything on history’s pyre, without the authorization by the masters who once crushed the native, the worker, the student. In-fancy dislocating the civilized continuity between life and language to lead us to the cleft of popular imagination: the only barricade that connects bodies with surfaces, the new with the old, life with its forms.

The entire university apparatus, with its knowledge of order, believes that the revolt is a “social phenomenon.” A reduction to causalism by current sociology, when truly the revolt is a medium of common sensibility in which the spirits of the past embrace the incandescence of our present. Thousands of Chileans knew this when they sang “The right to live in peace” (El derecho de vivir en paz) by Victor Jara or “The dance of those left behind” (El baile de los que sobran). Uncle Ho, who fought against North American imperialism, became a surplus, a remnant, much like the municipalized students of the 1980s, ungovernable who transmitted potency from one moment to another, who inherited the future to those who could hear the intensity of their voice. That is why October 18 is not a date, but rather an artifact of spiritualism by which the defeated were able to “evade” the historical cruelty of the victors.

Revolt^[4]

One of the first days of protests I found myself at 11am in Plaza Italia. I was going to the demonstration called for 2pm, but decided to arrive earlier to get a feel for the atmosphere. After all, politics is always an atmospheric affair. I began walking from Plaza Italia towards the Andes, that is, towards the Salvador Metro station and the landscape was made up of the rubble after the battle. On Sunday, there was a large demonstration, and protests continued during the night, in the midst of the declaration of a curfew. There was the sour smell of tear gas along the road, burning the skin; burned plastic occasionally penetrated the urban ruin. Some shops were burnt, others were intact: The Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center (GAM) was intact, the Kentucky Fried Chicken branch was burnt; the theater of the University of Chile was intact, the branch of the Bank of Chile was completely burnt.

Popular violence is not a “Hobbesian violence”[5] but a violence interrupting capitalist symbolism. These are not vandals who simply destroy everything they touch, but molecular movements that, most of the time, direct their fury against the signs of power. But this does not mean, that once the revolt is in full swing, several criminal gangs will not penetrate the popular din to progressively restore exchange value from within, inoculating economy into what the revolt had made aneconomical. Precisely: every revolt runs at a loss. The aneconomy of the revolt interrupts “the normal flow” of the country’s capital, the institutions stop working, temporality is strongly suspended. The upsetting of reality, a necessary elixir of revolt, is a sign that a people has broken out as a revolt. 

Because no revolt carries with it the sign of purity. It is dirty, full of mixtures that flourish in the suspension of historical time it has opened. Every revolt fights against its own centrifugal forces, because its power is measured in the ability to remove sovereign violence that, however, tries to capture it permanently. For this reason, a revolt must bring into play an untimely relationship with the present. It never fits with itself because it wildly differs from itself. We cannot demand purity and hygiene from a revolt, because all dynamics oriented towards cleansing or purification symbolize the triumph of sacrificial or sovereign violence that the revolt is destituting. It is sacrifice that purifies, sacrifice that cleanses the world to slaughter the goats that crystallize the new evil on earth.

Sacrifice is precisely the weapon of all reactionary politics, waiting like a shadow within the state formula: “no people has ever doubted that there was an expiatory virtue in the effusion of blood,” wrote Joseph De Maistre in his Treatise on sacrifices.[6] Precisely because the violence of the revolt deposes the sacrificial dynamic, because in it the martyrological power is at stake, that is, the one that seals without blood the revocation of all sovereignty: “A political execution”, asserts Paul W. Kahn, “read as an act of martyrdom, proclaims the weakness, not the strength of the state.”[7] This is because martyrdom threatens to “expose the state and its claim to authority as nothing.” [8] Popular violence is martyrological in this sense: its potency destitutes [9] sovereign violence, exposing its weakness and dissolving its claim to authority as nothingness.

It does not destroy, but destitutes; it does not establish, but revokes. It breaks the subject supposed to know that has erected the discourse, making it fall like a mask, and it can do nothing but exercise sacrificial violence so as to restore order. All calls from the government and the occasional political actor to dialogue are based on the sacrificial fiction, in which all the agents in conflict get solved in the same general equivalent: police lives are as much of a victim of violence as those of citizens who have fallen under the military bullet or police hunt. The government’s discourse is sacrificial precisely when it condemns violence “wherever it comes from.” This sets it up to exercise the greatest violence of all — sovereign violence precisely — which is such because it can crush all the other types of violence that it considers simply sectorial.

But in addition, the sacrificial paradigm raised by the state discourse restores, in turn, capital, to the extent that it restores the equivalent codification that enables state violence to be reconciled in the same unit with the torn revolt of a citizenry out in the open. The martyr breaks sacrifice to the same extent that it exposes its nothingness. Could we say that the notion of sovereignty once proposed by philosopher Georges Bataille is that of a true and properly martyrological sovereignty inasmuch as it implodes the moment it is exercised? [10] And if this is so, would not the Schmittian conception of sovereignty be one that has not assumed the radical nature of its concept, that has never lived up to what it proclaims? [11]

In any case, the term “martyrdom” has had a bad name because, from my point of view, it has always been conceived under the sacrificial aura or, what is the same, it has always been represented from the point of view of the victors who appropriated its concept to capitalize on it in terms of the restitution of order. Using the well-known Benjaminian distinction between pure and mythical violence, I would like to differentiate martyrdom from sacrifice and maintain that the first refers to a popular violence of a redemptive and destituent nature that establishes or preserves nothing and, the latter is oligarchic violence oriented towards the establishment and preservation of order.

In this light, a revolt is martyrological and not sacrificial, and brings with it the courage of living labor in which the affirmation of a potency is played out, rather than the consolidation of power. Beyond the purification of liberal discourse that condemns all violence, wherever it comes from, thereby trying to exempt itself from sacrificial dynamics while reproducing them, it is necessary to vindicate the violence opened up by the revolt that, however, suspends the sacrificial violence that, time and again, does nothing more than exert its mythical death power. It is not a matter of aestheticizing it, but to assume the materiality with which it denounces the injustice of the current state of affairs, exposing sovereign power to the nakedness of its nothingness.

A revolt is never welcome. Crowds don’t know whether to laugh or cry in front of it. They don’t know if it happens for better or worse, precisely because it does not obey any telos or any guarantee to the extent that it exposes the fragility of our bodies before history’s elements. But a revolt never comes in a uniform shape or mode, but is always different, multiple and intense. It is also unpredictable. All efforts to identify its causes always come to a limit. Knowledge goes bankrupt. And suddenly, everyone remembers the thousand reports that kept on showing the misery of our conditions. But at such a moment, we wonder: if the conditions were already there, why did the fuse light at this moment? Why not before or after? Between the conditions and their outbreak, something key always takes place: a murder, an act of radical injustice against certain bodies, committed by the exercise of State violence.

In the Arab Spring, the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in front of the police station was the imaginal operator that triggered the revolt. In Chile on October 18, thousands of high school students who had evaded the Metro turnstiles were brutally repressed by the police force. Five days after the proclamation of the State of Constitutional Exception, accompanied a nightly curfew apparatus, national and international Human Rights organizations were counting the death toll by State agents as the fierce way in which sacrificial violence was being deployed in the streets of a flooded city.

The revolt breaks out in various ways, an organization can take over — such as the one articulated today by Unidad Social. Like the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, which articulated a minimum organization during the 1987 Palestinian intifada, Unidad Social could also become an “agency” (a “support” according to Judith Butler) [12] born out of the revolt itself to keep its work alive and not to confiscate it in a dead and completely bankrupt representational apparatus. Because, in the midst of the bankruptcy of a state model violently implemented in 1973, we are witnessing a beginning. 

We do not know what will happen or how events will unfold. But in the face of the devastation wrought by the dictatorship and later by the transition, directing its efforts to separate bodies from their potency, lives from their images, in a neutralization process, the revolt restored their intensity. Faced with the neoliberal body confiscated by the company form — turned “to prey”, said Guadalupe Santa Cruz — the revolt restored a body potency. The fascination experienced by the participants in a political process such as this is entirely linked to the surprise that awaits the conscience — that poor counselor — of what a body can do, what bodies can do. Because the revolt throws us into this: a hand-to-hand combat.

We never imagined what our bodies could do, we were never aware of it. How could we be, if consciousness — that representational apparatus — does nothing more than instill fear in us and push us to calculate our every movement? The revolt is aneconomic precisely because it does not calculate and always runs at a loss. We have already lost comrades in struggle, eyes, academic calendars, international events (APEC-COP 25) and we will continue to lose. Everything has been suspended, then, as Furio Jesi saw: unlike a revolution, a revolt implies the “suspension of historical time.” [13] A suspension that brings with it a radical loss, an unconditional expenditure that is impossible to foresee, but also the opening of a beginning in which we can re-imagine another historical era. It is precisely that beginning that we must embrace today with all the forces of history. Without it, we will not only be left without a future or a past, but above all we will be stripped of the heat of a present.

Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited is now available in English from les presses du réel

Images: Tomas Munita

Notes

1. First published in El Desconcierto on November 27, 2019. 

2. Victor Jara (1932-1973) was a Chilean theater director, actor, playwright and folklore researcher, but generally known as a singer-songwriter, who actively participated in the Popular Unity’s presidential campaign. He was arrested after the coup in 1973 and was sent to the “Estadio Chile” (currently called “Víctor Jara Stadium”) where he was tortured and killed by the military. One of his most relevant songs was “The right to live in peace”, which Jara wrote inspired by Ho Chi Min and the Vietnam War. This song was massively sung during the recent protests along the country. —Editorial note.

3. Jorge González was the leader of Los Prisioneros, one of the main musical bands in recent Chilean history. Formed during the 1980s, they became a critical voice to the political and social order established by the dictatorship. One of their key songs was “The dance of those left behind”, which was massively sung during the protests in Plaza Dignidad. —Editorial note.

4. Originally published in Ficción de la Razón on October 29, 2019, as part of the special dossier “Estado generales de emergencia” coordinated by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and Mauricio Amar.

5. José Joaquín Brunner. Democracia, violencia y perspectivas futuras. Online here.

6. Joseph De Maistre. Tratado sobre los sacrificios. México, Sexto Piso, 2009, 24-25.     

7. Walter Benjamin, “On the Critique of Violence.”  

8. Paul W. Kahn. El liberalismo en su lugar. Santiago, Universidad Diego Portales, 2018, 112. 

9. The English edition incorrectly renders “destitutes/destituent” throughout as “dismisses.” —Note added by Ill Will.↰

10. Georges Bataille. Lo que entiendo por soberanía. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1996. 

11. Carl Schmitt. Teología política. Cuatro ensayos sobre el concepto de soberanía. Buenos Aires, Struhart y Cia., 2005. 

12. Judith Butler. Cuerpos aliados y lucha política. Hacia una teoría performativa de la asamblea. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2017.

13. Furio Jesi. Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Translated by Alberto Toscano, Seagull Books, Ch. 2. Online here. 

_______

SOURCE: IllWill

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Pachakuti: the Aymara term for a global transition, from Pacha (“the Earth” or the Space/Time we inhabit) and Kuti (“Change”). On the 500th anniversary of colonization in 1992, Aymaran spiritual leaders prophesied a new Pachakuti. During which, a period of forty years (1992-2032) would be a time of upheaval as the old world ends and the earth cycles back to the beginning.

October 19th, 2019: In Santiago de Chile, a metro evasion movement to protest a fare hike escalated into a national uprising against an economic system that rendered life untenable. Protesters set metro stations, banks, and supermarkets ablaze. The government’s repression of this uprising, by bringing the military into the streets and suspending civil liberties for the first time since the Pinochet Dictatorship (1973-1990), led to a crisis of legitimacy of the entire post-dictatorship political order. A month after this uprising, the ruling party and its opposition agreed to hold a referendum in April 2020 for Chileans to decide if there will be a constitutional assembly.

Not everyone in Chile is convinced that a new constitution will solve their problems and provide the framework for a life worth living. In Peñalolen, a población (a poor, peripheral neighborhood) in Santiago, Indigenous and non-Indigenous neighbors have worked together to build an Indigenous social center since 2013. There they have learned traditional Aymara and Mapuche techniques to build a Mapuche thatched roof hutand an Aymaran adobe house. The center hosts fundraisers for Mapuche political prisoners, local pirate radio programs, community dinners, neighborhood meetings, and educational events for school children. When asked about the current uprising, one Aymara participant said: “This uprising is part of the Pachakuti! Look at the other uprisings in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela. Look at climate change: the droughts in Northern Chile, the forest fires nationwide, and the polar ice caps melting. This uprising is a part of a larger process that we ultimately have no control over. People will have to migrate, change their lives, and not play the games we’re told to play.”

“And what games are we told to play?”I asked. “The game of debt and speculation needed to live in a world that no longer exists. The rich think they are better than everyone else because they have everything, but they bought it all on credit, just like the rest of us. Now, thanks to this uprising, the Chilean economy is going into a recession. The government is trying to make us fear this recession to demobilize us. They say: ‘If your movements destroy the economy, it will destroy you as well.’ But they don’t want us to see that the economy is already destroyed. Living in this world requires a future that will never come to be. Instead, we must live within the Pachakuti, realize that we already live in a new world in which we must be strong, take care of each other, and endure the rapid, uncontrollable change. We stop playing games when we accept this global transition around us.”

As we enter the second month of the protests, everyone is concerned with how to transform these protests into a more sustainable form. Most are convinced this is possible through directing the energy in the streets into winning the constitutional assembly referendum. However, many Chileans feel betrayed by their leftist political leaders behind this referendum. Despite the president’s 4% approval ratings, many leftist politicians have voted in favor of his package of public security laws: anti-barricade, anti-looting, and anti-mask laws. This has delegitimized elected representatives, who profess support to the movements despite their antagonistic actions against the current uprising. However, I wonder if as my Aymara friends suggest, that “they live in a world that no longer exists.” Albeit with less human suffering, they want people to return to their same work and daily life from before the uprising. They want to reform and stabilize public institutions to produce a stable daily life, a socially just economy, and a government that represents its constituency. However, ecological collapse exacerbating inequality, mass migration, uprisings in other parts of the world will render futile these attempts at sustainable social change.

In contrast to demanding new social welfare from public institutions, many in the poblaciónes are convinced that transforming the protests into a sustainable form is possible through self-organizing the means to reproduce social life. In these neighborhoods where life had become untenable before the uprising, neighbors have started community kitchens and informal markets that feed protesters and neighbors alike, cultural committees that program daily events, childcare committees that facilitate kid-friendly activities, and health committees that bring doctors and therapists to the neighborhood. While these initiatives have grown exponentially after the uprising, the Indigenous social center in Peñalolen have been facilitating such projects for years. As one resident explained, “Protesters set fire to the metro because it was something foreign. It controlled their lives, but they had no control over it. But if we cooperate to build our infrastructure, no one can say how it should be run because it is a part of all of us.” As another neighbor explained, “In fifty years, none of the new high rises in the city will be here. When they are gone, we must learn how to build with the material we have: clay, glass bottles, refuse, and wood.”

The most hopeful way neighbors attempt to transform the protests into more sustainable forms has started by developing a global perspective in which the uprising didn’t start on “October 19th, 2019,” but an indeterminate amount of time before. There will never be a date to declare when the uprising is won, only the endurance and promulgation of projects that enable people, rather than individuals representing those people, to shape and determine their daily lives.

source: https://territories.substack.com/p/santiago-de-chile-another-end-of

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INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY with the 14 kidnapped by the Chilean ‘democracy’

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We publish here a commuique from Chile that can offer understandings about the common practices of many different States against the social movements around the world and can make the international solidarity stronger. We have to understand the great need for powerfull bonds between the anatagonistic movements of this world, we have to make the network stronger. This communique is a serious and important analysis that offers questions which will find answers through the work of all different groups, in many different strategies and through many different methodologies of social, political and cultural action. // Void Network

An account of the structuration of an autonomous and libertarian subversion and the opening of a new cycle of confrontation against state and capital.
Introduction:The configuration generated since the end of 2009 threatens to raise the temperature and bring in a hot summer. This situation has been marked by recent events of broad repercussion such as the assault and raids on the squatted social centers carried out by the repressive forces under the orders of the “anti-bombs district attorney” Francisco Jacir, caving to the pressure from the Interior Ministry, specifically the bravado of subsecretary Patricio Rosende. This action, with a clear mediatic and political purpose, since it was carried out at election time, was recognized by the Interior Minister, Edmundo Pérez Yoma, when he declared that these raids against the young squatters “came at a very good moment.” Despite this, everything seems to indicate that the kangaroo court failed, principally for lack of real concrete evidence to back up serious accusations, which would confirm the lack of results in the investigation of the explosive attacks against institutions of State and Capital, and thus the success of the strategy of diffuse blows of autonomous, libertarian subversion based in groups without central direction, but coordinated along a common horizon. Proof of this is that the attacks have not only continued, they have expanded with growing force to other regions of the country, especially the city of Concepción where the existence of one or more operative cells has alarmed the political and police authorities.
Appending to these events was the recent expulsion from Argentina of Freddy Fuentevilla and Marcelo Villarroel Sepúlveda, combatants detained in Neuquén (Argentine Patagonia) for carrying weapons of war after crossing the Andes on foot, fleeing a mediatic police search that endangered their lives, then being blamed by the press for an assault on Banco Security and the subsequent armed clash in which a member of the repressive forces was killed, Sergeant Moyano.[trans: Freddy and Marcelo are two of the best known Chilean anarchist prisoners, and the campaign against their extradition back to Chile has spread internationally]
Naturally, the bourgeois press and loyal supporter of state violence catalogued as “cold-blooded murder” this clash between armed men in which the repressive forces came out on the losing end. When the police shoot a Mapuche, a student, a worker, or a villager in the back, the press, prostituted to capital and the state, prefers to speak in the cynical terms of a “case of confusion” or even “legitimate defense.” Of course, one cannot expect more from journalist-cops, but the level to which they can sink in endorsing the psychopathic violence of the police and the state against unarmed people, including children and elderly with no ability to defend themselves, is surprising and repugnant. This behavior by the official media goes against the grain even of what is suggested in reports coming from international organizations and a few Chilean organizations that have understood that human rights is something more than begging for a pension from the state. However, this same press, abject and unctuous, screams hysterically: “terrorism!” when the Mapuche defend themselves or when some autonomous group intends to return fire at a miniscule level and alter the impunity in which these criminals in uniform live, in their despicable work consistently preserving the privileges of a minority by beating, caging, and killing those who dare rise up.
Moreover, in the last days the recent government spokeswoman, Pilar Armanet, has admitted that government attorneys are investigating arms traffic from the metropolitan regions to the so-called “Mapuche conflict zone,” and also the detention of the Basque citizen supposedly involved in the string of bomb attacks in Santiago and the surrounding areas, in which furthermore they are seeking the contacts of Asel Luzuriaga [the detained Basque], with houses visited in the metropolitan region.[More can be found, in Spanish and Euskadi, on http://aselaskatu.org/ and in English on http://thisisourjob.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/basque-compa-framed-for-temuco-bombings-remains-in-preventative-detention/ ]
Nonetheless, at this point of evolution and escalation of the conflictivity by a part of the social movement in $hile, added to an uncertain election in which two factions of capital are disputing for control of the government, it can be asked whether the $hilean state is confronting the defiance of the State, as constituted by the struggle of the Mapuche in their war for liberation and the new urban autonomous libertarian subversion, with the same strategy of yesteryear. The following lines attempt to put in perspective some aspects of this problem, framed by the hypothesis that there is a new subversive defiance to the $hilean state that is currently in full evolution and development and that this can be the seed in a new cycle of confrontation with State and Capital that joins the other attempts that have existed in the history of $hile since the 20th century, which is to say we would be faced with the formation of a new attempt of proletarian attack.
The Fourth Generation War and the Anti-Subversive Strategy of the $hilean State
[trans: the term “fourth generation war” or “conflict” arose in the ‘80s within the strategic publications of the US Marine Corps, in a way presaging the related post-Cold War concept of “asymmetrical warfare” developed, again in the US, a decade later. The idea is that there were three previous generations of warfare, measured by distinct phases in increasing firepower as a replacement for the tactically inefficient increasing manpower (cannon fodder), combined with an increasing mobility for the employment of that firepower. Fourth generation warfare is the arrival at a point when the conflict has become so diffuse and unconventional that the target is not conquest of territory or annihilation of a military force, but the implosion of society or prevention of the same. What this means from our perspective is that after the Cold War, the Washington Consensus and NATO powers consider themselves owners of the entire world, with no external borders in principle, and they must finally recognize that their enemy is society itself, which they must constantly police, and defend against attacks from any sector within it, using innovative and unexpected means, since after all we don’t have recourse to armies or traditional military hardware. In other words, Global Civil War. The military acknowledges that communications media, from news corporations to the internet, play a major and often uncontrollable role in fourth generation conflicts, which are sometimes won or lost without a shot being fired.]
Curiously the first one to associate the groups of masked ones and anarchists with the onset of a fourth generation conflict was the general general José Alejandro Bernales, a known repressor and torturer when he was in charge of police intelligence with the carabineros and today a rehabilitated official saint of democracy, according to an interview given the evening journal La Segunda.
Though fourth generation warfare is a confused concept for political storytellers and military strategists, in general terms one could say it refers to conflicts that arose after the end of the Cold War and the East-West confrontation between the Soviet empire and the US empire. This would give rise to conflicts characterized by the existence of a diffuse enemy of such a form that the theater of military operations is indecipherable. At the same time, it is suggested that the hierarchies at play are not the conventional ones, but rather that they fade into sub-units that are part of a very diffuse organizational fabric. Do we see some similarity here to $hile and the claims by Minister Pérez Yoma excusing the police and the district attorneys for not finding the authors of the bomb attacks, since after all they were dealing with groups that arm themselves for just one attack and then dissolve?
Of course all of this is framed within the so-called asymmetrical conflicts, which is to say, conflicts between a strong actor and a weak one which suggests a type of confrontation in which the weak one eludes the military power of the strong one (the State). For this reason, the social war, subversion and insurrections for example, are characterized by the military strategists of the enemy as internal asymmetrical conflicts. Other characteristics of fourth generation conflicts are as follows:
Information is the principal element in the conflict. According to Colonel Thomas X. Hammes in an article published in the magazine Military Review of the US army, fourth generation conflicts (4GW) have produced a strategic change in warfare, mutating from military campaigns supported by information campaigns into communication campaigns supported by subversive or guerrilla operations. This comes to pass, furthermore, in the context of the passage from mechanical societies to information/electronic societies that could maximize the power of the insurgency. All of this tells us of the enormous importance that the enemy gives to communications, the use of information, and the creation of “public opinion” via the corporate press that back the strategy of the State-Capital complex. Seeing as the preceding is expounded by a high official of the imperial military, I propose taking it seriously.
The references to information and communications also tells us of the worries generated in our enemy by the potentialities of counter-information that circulates outside of the networks controlled by the powers. In this form, the enemy, which is to say the State-Capital complex and its military apparatus, is perfectly conscious that although communication networks and the transformations in the technological apparatus serve to develop the capitalist economy and energize the circulation of merchandise, they are also a tool for subversion of the dominant order and an accessible means for the social war of liberation. The most palpable proof of this situation is the hysterical screaming of [newspaper] El Mercurio against the anticapitalist blogs and web pages that, they claim, coordinate the anti-system groups.
A third characteristic of fourth generation wars is the organizational transformation of the weak enemy (that is, ourselves). Still following the argumentation of Colonel Hammes, the latest insurgencies demonstrate that one isn’t dealing with traditional organizations but rather voluntary coalitions connected by networks. These fourth generation insurgencies, just like their historical antecedents, maintain the common denominator of evading the military strong point of their opponent. It’s difficult at this point not to refer to the words of the ineffable Patricio Rosende [subsecretary of the Interior], who declared himself “fed up” after the last attack against a forestry truck on Mapuche lands and said the culprits “are cowards who act under the cloak of night.” But what did this coarse little servant of power expect? That the Mapuche would attack a police station in the center of Temuco in the full light of day with faces uncovered? These are the terms of bravery and cowardice in which they should wage their war of liberation? What wouldn’t surprise any military, that an insurgency seeks the element of surprise, chooses the appropriate terrain, takes the initiative, generating all the conditions that allow it to apply itself with the maximum of its powers against the weakest part of the enemy formation, evidently surprises and indignifies Señor Rosende. Such stupidity is hilarious.
Last but not least is the aspect related to capitalist globalization, which is that an interconnected world is highly vulnerable to interruptions in the transport chain of raw materials. Thus, commercial matters quickly transform themselves into problems of national security. In this aspect $hile, as a provider of raw materials par excellence, is a paradigmatic example: for example copper and cellulose production have already been affected by strikes by Codelco subcontractors or by attacks coming from the Mapuche insurgency. The potentialities but also the challenges this presents should be considered with the utmost seriousness by the new subversion within the framework of the opening of a new cycle of confrontation with the State.
But the central question is what forms will be taken by the anti-subversive reaction in the near future? We already outlined this in a recent article titled “Prepararse para lo que viene…” [Preparing for what comes], touching on an escalation in the repressive strategy of the State. But this escalation would seem to have mediatic objectives in demonstrating efficiency and responsiveness. It will get complicated once the State commits itself to a comprehensive offensive and the structuration of a strategy that adequately complements its operative intelligence and contextual analysis, which is to say a socio-political analysis. All this against a subversion that is going through a period of growth, evolution, and consolidation that, up to this moment, has been characterized by:
-Being diffuse, not setting up frontlines nor moving in accordance with the principles of militaries or vanguards of the Castro-Guevarist tendency.
-Functioning in a network or with a common horizon, discarding the classical form of a large pyramidal and hierarchical organization.
-Carrying out a confrontation, or at least a subversive defiance, with very low costs. Beyond self-producing its explosives with materials that can be gotten anywhere, not depending on any State or government to support it, nor on any central supply chain.
-Generally, being successful in striking without being struck.
-Having the effect of reproducing and multiplying potentialities, that have yet to be fully deployed, especially in peak moments of social and political conflictivity.
-Extending itself to the provinces and not occurring only in Santiago.
-Potentially being complementary to the liberation war of the Mapuche and to the boom in social protests that are not guided by reformist political parties, which is to say being complementary to social explosiveness.
-Finally, not being a local phenomenon but having a growing international dimension.
Needless to say, the manner in which the near future is confronted will determine the real possibilities of the new subversion to endanger the current order of domination.
[Translated by Porlos from an article in Spanish found on http://www.klinamen.org/

Much more information on the situation in Chile can be found, in Spanish, on

http://liberaciontotal.entodaspartes.net/ ]

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