Chile, its people, and the pleasure of defeating a fascist

Pelao Carvallo*

An anarchist explanation of the defeat of the anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-poor candidate in the Chilean presidential elections of December.

Kast's defeat as a pleasure for the people

The people who make Chile what it is defeated Kast. They realized the victorious, sadistic political eroticism of beating the powerful, while simultaneously denying them the masochistic reciprocity of that pleasure. It was a unilateral, vengeful enjoyment by the people against the perennial victors, who finally experienced the confirmation of the defeat they had been living since October 2019. The political eroticism of the resistance [1] was transmuted into the full, joyful eroticism of making the embodiment of racism, classism, and misogyny bite the dust during the transition.

The Chilean presidential runoff election on December 19th mobilized the people who make Chile what it is, driven by their desire to win and to achieve the complete defeat of the popular and social ills embodied by Kast. This is why Kast's defeat and Boric's victory are not the same thing. Kast's defeat was the full exercise of the pleasure of vanquishing the threat, not just banished it, but shattered it. Those who don't vote on principle weren't mobilized to vote by fear of the Kast threat; more important, more mobilizing, was the immense pleasure of being an active participant in the fall of the right-wing, misogynistic, anti-immigrant, anti-poor illusions embodied by the sad blond cowboy.

And, from a social perspective, more than a victory for Boric, what occurred was a defeat for Kast. The concrete fact is that women and those who radically abstain from voting gave Boric a resounding defeat [2] . This was clearly felt in the streets, markets, and families of Chile between November 20 – the first round – and December 19 – the second and final round. On November 20, in the streets, neighborhoods, and markets of Santiago's greater periphery, the surname Kast shamelessly permeated conversations, jokes about voting, and banter [3] at the open-air markets. By December 20, that surname had vanished from those same streets, neighborhoods, and markets. Not from social media, but from the exchange of words in neighborhoods and families. Shame had returned. And this was not due to a momentary event, a sudden shift in political stance, or an instantaneous awareness stirred by the pressure of the election campaigns. It was the decades-long politicization that feminisms and anarchisms in Chile (among other movements) have built in and through student rebellions, feminist strikes, school occupations, anti-pension fund protests, and revolutionary social uprisings—like the one in October 2019. That's what anarchism and feminism have done: remind us, the people, that just as happy submission is political, so is joyful insubordination. Kast's defeat is a product of the joyful politicization and insubordination of the people who make up the communities and who found a pleasurable, blissful reason to go and vote. Out of fear alone, this wouldn't have happened as it did.

The dispute over memory

History is not ours, and it is not made by the people: it is made by historians and belongs to the states. Memory, remembrance, that is ours, and we, all peoples, in all territories, and with all our imaginations and desires, create and recreate it constantly.

Following Kast's defeat, a dispute has arisen in Chile over the memory and interpretation of that defeat and its context. This is where we stand. The narrative of events, as a matter of memory, is under attack from the historicist normalization that the establishment needs in its sustained demand for ex post legitimacy. This operation ranges from reminding us of the institutional nature of candidate Boric [4] to figures like Lagos or Bachelet joining Boric's campaign to shape the consciences of the old Concertación and justify a new transition represented by the cabinets being formed. The objective is for us to remember these elections not as a defeat for Kast but as the victory of a new 30-year transition. This is even being done by attempting to erase the memory of the October 2019 uprising, as Lagos himself [5] and the mal-poet Zurita [6] have tried . The dispute over memory, over the form and content of memory, is very intense at this moment due to the establishment's [7] need to provide comfort to the future president, Boric. They don't worry about history because they've already won. Disputes over memories and remembrance take place in the present [8] with a very fast-paced nostalgia industry that nostalgically transforms collective events, trivializing them [9] in the process, as evidenced by the Matapacos/Brownie debate.

This dispute aims to give Boric space for governance and legitimacy, by co-opting the collective memory of the pleasure of defeating Kast into a sweetened narrative of electoral support for an increasingly normalizing proposal, as was the evolution of Boric's (and Kast's) discourse between the first and second rounds.

The defeat of the avant-gardes, incidentally

The people know. They know, above all, how to persevere. Those who want to move beyond mere resistance and persistence to rebellion and revolution must strive to give and acknowledge the victories of the people. Remaining solely focused on the narrative of resistance, defeat, and accusations of political error only serves to hand over the narrative of the people to those in power [6] . Interpreting an election, that political statistic, solely according to the results that suit incoming (or outgoing) governments is a repetitive and unproductive vanguardism for greater popular autonomy. [7] It is better to leave that task to the analysts of fear [8] who flourished in these elections.

Among other reasons, the scenario allowed the revolutionary sector that does not vote, and even more so, the disillusioned sector of society that does not vote, to make the difference in the absolute defeat of the anti-women right, since the certain vote does not count in this account, this scenario is marked by the voluntary nature of the vote, so threatened lately… if the vote were mandatory the popular desire to give the right a beating would not have acted because, precisely, it would have been mediated by the opposition to the mandatory nature of the vote [9]

It is necessary to emphasize Kast's defeat because it is, strictly speaking, the popular fact, the social fact, the pleasurable fact of these elections held to end the normalization of the revolt [10] , and therefore an effective candidacy had to invoke the revolt—precisely to normalize it—that is why it was Boric, not Provoste. The people are not naive, and they know that the exhaustion of permanent resistance is unsustainable, and within the existing circumstances, they seek to find their own victories, against what vanguard moralism dictates and against what power, statist normalization, desires. Therefore, Kast's defeat belongs to the people who make up Chile, and Boric's triumph belongs to statist normalization, and it is against this that we must continue fighting, fortunately not from permanent defeat but from a joyful and resounding victory to which Boric himself must pay attention, since it was the "extra" votes that defined the situation, those "extra" votes of those of us who did not vote, of the women, of the rebels.

December 25th 2021

* Member of the CLACSO Working Group on Collective Memories and Practices of Resistance.

[1] https://elpais.com/internacional/2021-12-15/ricardo-lagos-las-posiciones-radicales-de-la-extrema-izquierda-le-han-hecho-la-campana-a-kast.html

[2] https://www.laizquierdadiario.cl/De-Ricardo-Lagos-a-Raul-Zurita-PC-la-estrategia-de-criminalizar-la-protesta-y-blindar-al-regimen-de

[3] https://www.clacso.org/anarquismo-en-tiempos-de-punkdemia/

[4] https://www.agendaoculta.com.mx/2021/02/16/wandavision-en-la-memoria-de-la-memoria-audiovisual-y-la-nostalgia-del-imperio-2/

[5] https://twitter.com/imononerd/status/1473810809104965633

[6] https://elporteno.cl/el-triunfo-de-que/

[7] https://www.eldiarioar.com/opinion/18-brumario-chileno_129_8605857.html

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq4JqFk4ZWk

[9] https://www.elciudadano.com/columnas/chile-contra-la-rebeldia-antielectoral-el-voto-obligatorio/06/18/

[10] https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=551884639376177